"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
Washington believes Obama was made to appear weak.
Michael Sheridan, Far East Correspondent
MORE than half of Chinese people questioned in a poll believe China and America are heading for a new “cold war”.
The finding came after battles over Taiwan, Tibet, trade, climate change, internet freedom and human rights which have poisoned relations in the three months since President Barack Obama made a fruitless visit to Beijing.
According to diplomatic sources, a rancorous postmortem examination is under way inside the US government, led by officials who think the president was badly advised and was made to appear weak.
In China’s eyes, the American response — which includes a pledge by Obama to get tougher on trade — is a reaction against its rising power.
In an interview on CNN Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated that although the health care reform issue is a complex one, the White House and many in Congress are not ready to give up on passing this bill.
It is therefore important to stay on top of this, and vote against a government takeover of healthcare.
This is very interesting. Somehow, though, I am not that surprised. Thank you for sending this,
By a Special Forces buddy with contacts.
To All,
I just returned from Haiti with Hxxxx. We flew in at 3 AM Sunday to the scene of such incredible destruction on one side and enormous ineptitude and criminal neglect on the other.
Port au Prince is in ruins. The rest of the country is fairly intact. Our team was a rescue team and we carried special equipment that locates people buried under the rubble. There are easily 200,000 dead, the city smells like a charnel house. The bloody UN was there for 5 years doing apparently nothing but wasting US Taxpayers money. The ones I ran into were either incompetent or outright anti-American. Most are French or french speakers, worthless every damn one of them.
While 1800 rescuers were ready willing and able to leave the airport and go do our jobs, the UN and USAID (another organization full of little OBamites and communists that openly speak against America ) These two organizations exemplared their parochialism by:
USAID, when in control of all inbound flights, had food and water flights stacked up all the way to Miami , yet allowed Geraldo Rivera, Anderson Cooper and a host of other left wing news puppies to land.
Pulled all the security off the rescue teams so that Bill Clinton and his wife could have the grand tour, whilst we sat unable to get to people trapped in the rubble.
Stacked enough food and water for the relief over at the side of the airfield then put a guard on it while we dehydrated and wouldn't release a drop of it to the rescuers.
No shower facilities to decontaminate after digging or moving corpses all day, except for the FEMA teams who brought their own shower and decon equipment, as well asair conditioned tents.
No latrine facilities, less digging a hole. If you set up a shitter everyone was trying to use it.
I watched a 25 year old Obamite with the USAID shrieking hysterically, berate a full bird colonel in the air force, because he countermanded her orders, whilst trying to unscrew the air pattern. " You don't know what your president wants! The military isn't in charge here we are!"
If any of you are thinking of giving money to the Haitian relief, or to the UN don't waste your money. It will only go to further the goals of the French and the Liberal left.
If we are a fair and even society, why is it that only white couples are adopting Haitian orphans. Where the hell is that vocal minority that is always screaming about the injustice of American society.
Bad place, bad situation, but a perfect look at the new world order in action. New Orleans magnified a thousand times. Haiti doesnt need democracy. What Haiti needs is Papa Doc. That's not just my opinion. That is what virtually every Haitian we talked with said. The French run UN treat us the same as when we were a colony, at least Papa Doc ran the country.
Oh, and as a last slap in the face the last four of us had to take US AIRWAYS home from Phoenix . They slapped me with a $590 dollar baggage charge for the four of us. The girl at the counter was almost in tears because she couldn't give us a discount or she would lose her job. Pass that on to the flying public.
A gun rights organization has launched a petition effort to build opposition to plans being discussed by U.S. officials and the United Nations that could result in the confiscation and destruction of privately owned firearms inside the U.S.
The online petition, run by officials with the National Association for Gun Rights, offers participants a conduit to tell their U.S. senators a "Small Arms Treaty"' being discussed is "nothing more than a massive global gun control scheme, designed to register, ban and confiscate firearms from law-abiding citizens."
Spokesman Luke O'Dell has explained in on online statement that the exact wording of the proposal so far has been kept "under wraps."
"But looking at previous versions of the U.N. 'Small Arms Treaty,' you and I can get a good idea of what's likely in the works," he wrote. "Don't let any of the 'experts' lull you to sleep by saying 'Oh, we have it handled' or 'Until you know exactly what's in the treaty you can't fight against it.'"
"Judging by Ambassador [John] Bolton's comments – who certainly knows what to expect from the American-freedom-hating international crowd that infests the U.N. – we are certain the treaty's going to address the private ownership of firearms," O'Dell wrote.
In a video posted on the website for the National Rifle Association, Bolton said, "I think it was clear from the outset that the Obama administration would move in this direction. The only thing that's surprising is that it's taken this long."
He said the presentations have portrayed the "Small Arms Treaty" as something to address international arms trade. "But there's no doubt that the real agenda is domestic firearms control," he said.
He said there are many references that the only targets would be "illicit" arms.
"That begs the whole question. What's legal and what's illegal in a domestic application?" he said.
"Whatever the appearance on the surface, there's no doubt that domestic firearms control is right at the top of the agenda," he said.
O'Dell suggested that the new "international" law could bring tougher licensing requirements, programs to confiscate "unauthorized" firearms and even a ban on the private ownership of weapons inside the U.S.
The petition delivers to senators a request to oppose any plans to ratify a U.N. "Small Arms Treaty."
"The ratification of this treaty would also likely create an international gun registry, setting the stage for full-scale gun confiscation," it states.
WND reported last fall when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton first announced the U.S. had changed its stance and would support negotiations of an Arms Trade Treaty to regulate international gun trafficking.
The Bush administration had opposed it.
The U.S. also at that point joined a nearly unanimous 153-1 U.N. vote to adopt a resolution setting out a timetable on the proposed Arms Trade Treaty, including a U.N. conference to produce a final accord in 2012.
While Clinton called the plan a "crucial national security concern for the United States," gun rights advocates said it was an attempt under President Obama to sneak gun control into the U.S. without having the issue debated in Congress.
At the time, Brian Wood, disarmament expert for Amnesty International, said in a Bloomberg report the U.S. is the largest conventional arms trader in the world and the unregulated trade of conventional arms "can fuel instability, transnational organized crime and terrorism."
"All countries participate in the conventional arms trade and share responsibility for the 'collateral damage' it produces – widespread death, injuries and human rights abuses," said Rebecca Peters, director of the International Action Network on Small Arms in an Agence France-Presse interview. "Now finally governments have agreed to negotiate legally binding global controls on this deadly trade."
But Bob Barr, a former U.S. representative and presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party, explained in a separate interview with the NRA how a treaty that looks like it's all about fighting international crime will necessarily lead to erosion of Second Amendment gun rights:
"Even though [treaty advocates] all say, 'We are not going to involve domestic laws and the right to keep and bear arms, that won't be affected by all this,' that's nonsense," Barr said. "There's no way that if you buy into something like this and a treaty is passed regulating to ensure that firearms transfers internationally don't fall into the hands of people that the U.N. doesn't like, there's no way that that mechanism will work unless you have some form of national regulation and national tracking."
The effort is just one more of the outreaches launched under Obama that critics fear could lead to additional gun bans. They have expressed concern his nominee to head the Occupational Safety and Health Administration could arbitrarily ban guns across large segments of society as a "job safety" concern.
Also, Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder, supported Washington, D.C.'s ban on handguns before it was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. And since Obama has been in office, he's already advocated for a treaty that would require a federal license for hunters to reload their ammunition, has expressed a desire to ban "assault" weapons, has seen a plan to require handgun owners to submit to mental health evaluations and sparked a rush on ammunition purchases with his history of anti-gun positions.
Editor's Note: You can click on any of the graphs to enlarge them.
It is a challenge to say that things are getting better when every month that goes by more Americans are losing their jobs or needing to apply for food assistance. In the latest data for food assistance through SNAP we find that 200,000 more Americans were added to the program. That now brings the total number of Americans on food assistance to 38,183,000. 1 out of 10 Americans are receiving food assistance. For 2009 this cost the government $50 billion, up from $34 billion in 2008 and $30 billion in 2007. It should be no surprise then that average Americans are questioning the viability of a middle class in the upcoming decade.
But even when we look at the balance sheet of the government, things are still not improving:
Source: U.S. Treasury
Take a look at the amount of revenue (taxes) the government brought in for the month of December. $218 billion was taken in. But look at data from December of 2008. The government at the peak of the crisis brought in $237 billion. So this December was even worse than the one ending 2008. How is this a sign of recovery? You would assume that receipts would be going up if things were in fact getting better. All we see is the spending side of the equation going up and the only sector in the economy turning a solid profit is the banking sector that is now running a new form of corporatocracy. It would be one thing if we were adding jobs each and every month but even the massive amounts of bailouts have yet to yield any visible help for average Americans.
In the past few decades Americans have seen more and more of their income being eaten up by the housing sector of the economy:
This latest decade saw a much larger share of income going to housing than any in the past. Unlike stocks, every American needs to live somewhere and will need to either pay a mortgage if they own or pay rent. The banking sector found a method of siphoning off wealth from the biggest asset Americans hold. In a purely fiat money system, banks can create money out of thin air. The Federal Reserve has done this through the monetization of debt. Now think about this, if a participating member bank borrows say $1 million from the Fed it can then turn around and lend the money out through loans up to $9 million courtesy of fractional reserve banking. With current interest rates, if it borrows from the Fed at near zero even a 5 percent return on bread and butter mortgages would yield $450,000 a year for doing absolutely nothing but being a middleman. And some banks have gone ahead and issued credit cards with 79.9 percent rates. When Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers failed their leverage was even higher at 20 and even 30 to 1. The other investment banks are near those levels even today yet with full government support.
So why bring this up? In the United States debt is treated as money. In fact, without debt we wouldn’t have money. I think this is lost on many. When someone goes to a bank and takes out a mortgage with virtually no money down, all of a sudden a liability and asset of a few hundred thousand is created out of financial alchemy. So when this housing bubble burst trillions of dollars evaporated from the system but it was nothing more than erasing previous debt that really had no actual backing.
So if the Fed can create money out of thin air through their banking web why is the economy still faltering? In boom and bust cycles we see a love and revulsion towards debt. Banks can be willing to lend out money but you can’t force average Americans to borrow. This past decade we saw the absolute disregard for prudent debt lending and now, many Americans are averse to taking out loans. In fact, now that banks are actually checking and verifying incomes it turns out that many middle class Americans really don’t qualify for additional debt.
This brings us to our next chart looking at household debt:
Even after the stock market recovery, it is estimated that average Americans have seen their household net worth decline by $11 trillion since the peak of this bubble. Yet take a look at the chart above. Household debt still remains near the peak. And keep in mind that real estate was the biggest item of net worth for Americans and this has fallen by roughly $6 trillion. Yet the loans remain the same. And that is largely a reason for the flood of foreclosures and bankruptcies. While banks still have mortgages valued at peak levels the actual market value is much less. The U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve made a troubling bet during the early days of the crisis that things would correct quickly. Actually, I tend to believe that the Fed knew all along that when push came to shove, the entire banking sector would be bailed out by the U.S. taxpayer since the Fed is simply the lender of first and last resort for member banks.
So this leaves Americans contenting with debt amounts that no longer reflect the value of their underlying asset. Yet the banking sector is now fully supported by the taxpayer. So with the current system in place, if banks do fail taxpayers are on the hook. The Fed has setup the perfect trap for middle class Americans. If average Americans decide to walk away from their underwater mortgages then the bill will be paid by taxpayers. After all, we are already told that the too big to fail by definition won’t fail. And the other option is to continue paying a mortgage on a home that is no longer worth its value. Many Americans simply cannot afford to do this. Do you notice how in no scenario the banks lose? This is another characteristic of the corporatocracy. And the FDIC which insures bank deposits is essentially insolvent:
And the FDIC backs $13 trillion in total assets with a fund that is insolvent! Now that is maximum leverage.
Over the past decade as the financial sector gained more and more power many Americans saw more and more money go to their housing payment. The housing bubble was merely the end product of the banking sector through Wall Street flooding the system with debt. If we live in a world where only one house is on the block and you have $1,000 and I have $1,000 and we both want the house the maximum we can pay for the home is $1,000 given our resources. But enter a bank that is willing to create debt of $10,000 in the form of a mortgage and say we are obsessed with the house; it is very likely we would be willing to pay $11,000 for the home. Is the home really worth $10,000 more? Of course not. But our $1,000 just got a lot less valuable. And this is the crux of a fiat money system. The government can force it as legal tender but if the value continues to erode people will begin questioning the system. It is only valuable to the point that people have faith in it. And right now many Americans are losing faith in the system.
HAMILTON — Michael Halcomb and Tom Long are nosey. They are always on the lookout for shadows in the night, something out of place or just plain suspicious activity in Butler County neighborhoods.
And residents don’t mind a bit.
Halcomb of Trenton and Tom Long, a Hamilton resident, team up regularly to be the eyes and ears of the sheriff’s office as part of the Citizens on Patrol program. Both laughed when asked if the pay is good.
“Oh, I have mine direct deposit,” said Long, a 70-year-old retiree, with a laugh.
They, like the eight other COP members, are volunteers.
Patrolling in a special cruiser with a yellow light bar, COP members assist deputies with traffic control at crashes and fires, aid to stranded motorists and making vacation checks for residents who call the sheriff’s office for security when they are out of town.
“They really free up deputies to do more pressing duties,” said Lt. Jean Collett, support service superior in charge of the unit.
Last week, Long and Halcomb were checking houses in a Liberty Twp. subdivision when they spotted a man who just didn’t seem to be “acting quite right.”
“It was dark and raining to start with. He was walking in the street then stopping and looking around. He didn’t stop to ask for directions, he wasn’t walking a dog and he didn’t have a cigarette,” Long said, noting all possible reasons to be walking in a storm.
Halcomb added, “he was fidgety. It just didn’t fit.”
COP units are not armed or permitted to act if presented with criminal activity, so Long said they called “the big dogs.”
Deputies thought the man may be a thief looking to kick in a door or swipe a stereo from a car. Detectives determined he was wanted on warrants from Hamilton Municipal Court and took him into custody.
Last year, the COP unit made 724 vacation checks and drove 10, 550 miles on patrol.
Halcomb chuckled remembering a startled resident who returned home early from vacation and was loading his riding mower when COP volunteers came for a vacation check.
“We called the deputies out on him,” Halcomb said. “After it was straightened out, he was glad we were doing our job.”
Contact this reporter at (513) 820-2168 or lpack@coxohio.com.
ABC, CBS and NBC reports on federal budget give the president pass on spending, ignore critical liberal and conservative economists who argue it is 'unsustainable.'
President Obama just submitted a $3.8 trillion budget proposal, the largest federal budget ever, which will come with a “record amount of red ink.” The projected deficit of that budget would be $1.6 trillion, yet the networks didn’t criticize him for being spendy.
To put this in perspective: Obama is proposing a budget $700 billion larger than big spender Pres. George W. Bush’s last budget. It’s TWICE the size of Pres. Bill Clinton’s last budget of $1.9 trillion, who was credited with generating a budget surplus.
Despite the “staggering” size of Obama’s budget, which broadcast networks admitted was “dripping with red ink,” the reports managed to paint him as a fiscal conservative and deficit slasher.
NBC’s Savannah Guthrie portrayed all the excess spending as a way to get the economy back on track saying: “He’s asking for $100 billion to spur job growth – things like tax cuts for small business, tax breaks to increase wages – and he’s doing this knowing that it will drive up the deficit, certainly even more in the short term. But all economists agree the real way to get a chunk out of the deficit is to increase hiring.”
But Guthrie was highlighting only a tiny fraction of the overall budget and failed to criticize the administration for not finding ways to cut more waste.
CBS’s Bill Plante also agreed with Obama’s spending priorities for the $3.8 trillion budget Feb. 1 when he said the president “needs” to spend right now.
“The president has a serious money problem. He needs to spend more money in the short-term to create jobs, but he desperately needs to spend a lot less over the long-term,” Plante said on “The Early Show.”
Obama began his budget announcement on Feb. 1 by once again passing the buck to “previous administrations.” Clearly blaming Bush for what he termed a “decade of profligacy,” Obama criticized the funding of two wars, prescription drug spending and tax cuts before presenting himself as a fiscal conservative.
ABC’s David Muir must have bought it, because his Feb. 1 “World News” report echoed Obama. Muir pinned the record deficits on President Bush’s tax cuts and war spending when he answered the question: “How did we get here?”
His timeline of the expanding federal deficit began with an image of Bush signing a bill and the words “Tax relief for America.” This has long been the claim of the national news media. While Bush was certainly responsible for helping balloon the federal deficit, American’s for Tax Reform’s tax policy director Ryan Ellis told the Business & Media Institute the tax cuts weren’t the problem, overspending was.
“The networks are stupid if they think tax cuts had anything to do with this,” Ellis explained. Tax revenues were higher than the average when Bush took office, but fell before the tax cuts because of the dot-com bust and the 2001 recession.
“Federal tax revenues are much more dependent on the economy than they are on tax policy. Tax revenues ROSE as a percent of the economy in the years after the BTC (Bush Tax Cuts) became law. They only fell again when the economy imploded.”
According to Ellis and others, the real problem is government spending. Even a budget expert with the liberal Brookings Institution told the Wall Street Journal that Obama’s “proposals will still leave us with unsustainable deficits as far as the eye can see.”
Yet, none of the broadcast network morning or evening news shows mentioned that Bush’s last budget was $700 billion less than Obama’s proposal for 2011 or that Clinton’s last (nominal) budget was half its size.
A couple of those reports cited political dissatisfaction with Obama’s budget but none actually criticized Obama for spending too much.
Obama the Fiscal Conservative
While it seems impossible that the media could paint the man proposing the largest federal budget in history as waste-cutting and fiscally responsible, that’s exactly what they did.
NBC’s “Nightly News” followed up its Feb. 1 budget report with a “Fleecing of America” report on waste in defense spending. Lisa Myers report highlighted one particular project that made Congress look bad and Obama look good the very same day he proposed massive spending increases.
“The C-17 cargo plane is the workhorse of the military. It carries troops and equipment to war zones, helps in a crisis like Haiti. Just about everyone agrees the C-17 is a terrific plane. But the Pentagon has said it has enough and wants to stop buying them. Still, Congress just voted to build 10 more planes. Cost: $2.5 billion. Today the president said this makes no sense,” Myers said before cutting to video of Obama calling the project “waste, pure and simple.”
An ABC report on Feb. 1 also made Obama out to be fiscally responsible. Jake Tapper reported, “On the same day President Obama introduced his massive budget, he acknowledged that government spending cannot continue at this pace.”
Then he quoted Obama, who said, “The bottom line is this. We simply cannot continue to spend as if deficits don’t have consequences, as if waste doesn’t matter, as if the hard-earned tax dollars of the American people can be treated like Monopoly money.”
No one in that report suggested that was exactly what Obama’s budget would do. Tapper quoted one Democrat and one Republican opposed to a piece of the budget, but did not consult anyone suggesting the budget as a whole is simply enormous and irresponsible.
Obama has requested $49.7 billion for the Dept. of Education, which appropriated $38.4 billion in 2000. He also plans to expand the budget for the Dept. of Energy to $28.4 billion. In 2000, that agency’s budget was just under $15 billion according to historical tables on the OMB Web site.
Since Obama took office the networks have cheered for government spending on the stimulus package and bailouts, protected him from rising unemployment and now with the budget reports they’ve taken the spin to a whole new level by portraying the spendthrift as a cost-cutting champion.
Let the Administration Do the Talking
Network reports on Obama’s budget favorably quoted administration officials (Obama, budget director Peter Orszag, press secretary Robert Gibbs) a number of times, but mostly ignored tax or economic experts critical of the budget.
All three networks’ morning and evening newscasts reported the 2011 budget announcement on Feb. 1. In those reports, administration officials were quoted or interviewed seven times. Four other politicians were included in reports, but only a single economic expert was brought on. That was Robert Bixby of the Concord Coalition, a non-profit devoted to fiscal responsibility.
The networks should have consulted more budget and tax experts including Isabel Sawhill, a budget expert at the liberal Brookings Institution. The Wall Street Journal on Feb. 1 quoted her as saying, “‘The pay-go rules will make it more difficult for Congress to dig the hole deeper but won't affect currently projected red ink; and the commission will likely be a paper tiger,’ she wrote on Friday. ‘In short, these proposals will still leave us with unsustainable deficits as far as the eye can see. It is depressing to discover that we can no longer even aspire to balance the budget once the recession is over.’”
Michael Pento, chief economist at Delta Global Advisors, called Obama’s budget “so outrageously egregious that he had to hold a special press conference on Monday just to spin the news.”
Pento warned that the massive federal deficits, which are projected to be between $700 billion and $1 trillion through 2002, will push the U.S. economy “over the cliff.”
If you think a $3.8 trillion budget is bad, just wait and see what the government actually spends. The problem with budgets is that they are based on assumptions of revenue and spending and often, those don’t come true.
CATO’s Chris Edwards provided an example in the National Review online at CATO’s Web site Feb. 1. He explained that in his first budget, Bush proposed to increase spending “at a healthy clip, rising to $2.71 trillion by 2011.”
“The lesson from all this is that an administration’s promised spending beyond the first year is meaningless,” Edwards wrote.
Obama’s budget also has plenty of assumptions in it that might not come true. Health care reform, which ABC’s Jake Tapper described as on “life support” is figured into the budget, but potential costs of cap-and-trade are not. NBC proved its support for ObamaCare by saying that without its passage it would “tack on” another $150 billion to the deficit, since the 2011 budget assumes its cost savings.
According to Ellis, the budget also assumes an economic growth rate of 3.35 real GDP growth. That he said is “rosy,” given the fact that real GDP has averaged 2.89 percent since 1980.
University of Maryland economic professor Peter Morici was also skeptical: “If your staff economist tells you that [growth rates assumed in the budget] is realistic, fire him.”
The network budget reports didn’t provide that viewpoint.
