Sonny Bono: Murder Conspiracy Coverup Continues
by DAVID MARTIN

It is now news in Australia that new evidence has turned up that California congressman Sonny Bono was murdered and did not die in a skiing accident as we have been told. Although he was an American whose job was to represent Americans, as far as the mainstream United States press is concerned, this news is unworthy of the attention of the people of the United States. This is the same American press, of course, that has never breathed the slightest hint of suspicion that there might have been foul play involved when the experienced skier Bono was reported to have slammed into a tree at the Heavenly Ski resort in Nevada on January 5, 1998. There were no witnesses, the autopsy report was not released to the public, and Bono had shown himself to be something of a thorn in the side of official Washington, which is probably all the more reason for the lapdogs who call themselves journalists to have dummied up.For Americans, the new revelations can be found buried away and ignored by "respectable people" in the U.S. supermarket tabloid, Globe, of April 14, which hit the news racks on April 4.

It was said to have been gathered by investigator Bob Fletcher, 66, who, according to Globe, was connected to the case even before Bono died:He also feels partially responsible for what happened to the California congressman. Before Bono's death, Fletcher had been probing the activities of high ranking U.S. military and government officials he claims were raking in millions from arms and drug deals in Central America and Southeast Asia.He says he sent his shocking findings of corruption, including videotaped evidence, to Bono."I later received a call from an assistant in his offices to tell me Sonny had seen my full report and was absolutely livid about the level of corruption I made him aware of," Fletcher tells GLOBE.

"He was going to make it his No. 1 priority when Congress resumed after the Christmas and New Year break. He was going to go after the biggest names."Just 10 days later, I received a call that he was dead. I'd heard it was suspected his offices had been bugged. Tragically, that must have been the case. There's no doubt in my mind Sonny was murdered by someone who needed to silence him."The new evidence is the long-suppressed autopsy report, itself, which Fletcher obtained and furnished to the Globe. After reviewing the shocking secret documents, former FBI agent Ted Gunderson tells GLOBE: "The official version of Sonny Bono's death is hogwash. It's nonsense for anyone to now try to suggest that Bono died after crashing into a tree.There's zero evidence in this autopsy report or any of these official documents to show such an accident happened. Instead, there's powerful proof he was assassinated.

"This was an evil plot that was carried out to almost perfection by ruthless assassins."Even though two of the online Australian newspapers attribute their article to "staff writers," it's the same short article in The Australian, Mercury (The Voice of Tasmania), and The Daily Telegraph, beginning:SONNY Bono, former husband and singing partner of superstar Cher, was clubbed to death by hitmen on the orders of drug and weapons dealers who feared he was going to expose them, a former FBI agent claims.Ted Gunderson, now a private investigator, has told the US Globe tabloid that Bono, who served as mayor of Palm Springs for four years, did not die after hitting a tree on a Nevada ski slope in January 1998 as everyone believed.

So identical, are they, in fact, that all three of them have the first sentence in bold. Continuing in the brief, rather sketchy article, they say:Bono, an experienced skier, was ambushed on the slopes by hired hitmen, who beat him to death and then staged a tree collision, Mr Gunderson said.He called for authorities to dig up Bono's remains and open a homicide investigation.His claims have reportedly been backed by top forensics experts who fear Nevada authorities were too quick to call the death a skiing accident.Interestingly, Yahoo also picked up the story, but it is Yahoo for the United Kingdom and Ireland and Yahoo for Australia. It would appear that Yahoo is as compliant toward corrupt American authorities as it is toward their counterparts in China.THE AUTOPSYHow compelling is the new evidence? The five-page autopsy report prepared by Dr. David E. Palosaari, official pathologist for Washoe County at the time, concluded that the death was caused by "craniocerebral injuries due to blunt force trauma (skiing accident)."But Globe reports further:Other injuries detailed in the document included a black eye, swollen lips, bloody nose, bruised jaw, and two upper teeth knocked out, all on the right side of the head.But the pathologist also noted a series of small fractures in a "central depressed region" on the right side of Bono's skull and found "some of the fractured bone pieces have a curved configuration."Fletcher consulted a panel of experts and performed a re-creation to determine how these wounds were caused.He concludes the depressed area was due to blows from a rounded-edged weapon wielded by a man taller than the 5-foot-nine, 165-pound politician and the killer was left-handed since the wounds are on the right side of Bono's face and head. He also believes there was a second man who held Bono from behind.Fletcher thinks the murder weapon was a pistol, but other experts tell GLOBE that a gun barrel would have left distinguishable marks."Sonny was ambushed and viciously battered to death with a billy club or similar weapon," ex-FBI man Gunderson says. "The killers staged the crime scene and made it look like a tragic ski-accident."Fletcher insists the lack of damage to the back of Bono's brain, known as "contra-coup" injuries, is proof that he was beaten to death.

He says people who hit objects face-first normally have brain injuries caused when the organ rebounds off the back of their skull. And other physical evidence doesn't add up, either, he says.Strangely for what was called a ski accident, Bono had no smashed ribs, broken knees, neck trauma--or hand injuries that would have come from trying to ward off a collision with a tree, Fletcher says. And signs that he actually hit the tree--including bark impressions on his face and plant debris on his clothes--are also missing, the investigator says.And his ski goggles weren't smashed as they likely would have been in a collision, according to the expert.Fletcher also notes the back of Bono's clothes were soaked with blood--but he had no back wounds. "The blood must have come from someone else, perhaps when Sonny valiantly fought back and hit one of his assailants," he declares.The autopsy also mentions a small L-shaped tear on the back of Bono's black and purple Fila ski jacket. Fletcher says the tear is a likely result of a struggle. And Gunderson believes the new evidence gathered by Fletcher raises the specter of murder and warrants a new investigation.Fletcher believes that Bono's wife when they became famous together, Cher, will call for a new investigation when she learns of these new revelations.

Little hope is held out, apparently, that she will be joined by Mary Bono, Sonny's wife at the time of his death. Mary, who succeeded Sonny in the Congress and has remarried, has suggested publicly that his errant skiing was caused by Sonny having taken too many prescription painkillers. But that suggestion had already been contradicted by a previously-released toxicology report, said Globe.Sonny's mother, Jean, on the other hand, believed all along that he was murdered. She died in 2005, but not before demanding "a much more thorough investigation" into his death, according to Globe.A WACO CONNECTION?Gunderson agrees with Fletcher that the 62-year-old Bono was likely to have been killed because of what he might uncover, or had already uncovered, about illegal drug and arms dealing by high-level government officials. But there are other possibilities. When Janet Reno testified before Congress about the final, fatal assault on the Branch Davidians at Waco, Bono was relentless in his questioning about the professed use of CS gas on the confined men, women, and children:Representative Sonny Bono (R-CA), a member of the full House Crime Committee, was concerned that Ms. Reno had not conducted a more exhaustive study of CS before making a decision. He challenged her claim that she had done all she could to investigate the attributes and hazards of the substance, noting that the U.S. Army Chemical Research and Development Center had confirmed that it knew of no laboratory studies of CS in which the subjects were children.

He pointed out that Army databases "contain virtually every study on CS that has ever been conducted by any government or private facility in the world," and stated that he found it "difficult to understand how, after extensive, exhaustive research you failed to uncover the following information that I uncovered in just one day: a report contained in the Journal of the American Medical Association, dated August 4, 1989, that states, I quote, 'Inhalation and toxicology studies at high levels of CS exposure have demonstrated its ability to cause chemical pneumonitis and fatal pulmonary edema.' According to an ear, nose, and throat surgeon that I talked to, pulmonary edema is caused when the mucous membrane is irritated, it secretes mucous which in children and infants plugs up the bronchi. They thus drown in their own saliva and mucous. As soon as the child breathes the fumes, the process begins. Soon after that, the child has little lungs left to breathe, and dies. I find it impossible to believe that with the most powerful law firm in the country, the Department of Justice, at your disposal you could not find this information out, that I found out in one day with two staff members .... So I am sorry to say, Madam Attorney General, that I think you failed there." He concluded with the observation that, in his opinion, "it is the responsibility of the Attorney General in cases like this to research every bit of evidence, and if there is counter evidence, then the error should be on the side of the children." Robert W. Lee, "Waco Whitewash."What we see here on display is an independence of mind that is both refreshing and dangerous for an American member of Congress.

Perhaps Bono looked even further into the Waco outrage and found the Waco Holocaust Electronic Museum, which concludes that the whole episode was even more vicious and barbaric than almost anyone suspects. Then again, any member of Congress looking seriously into high level corruption finds himself in what the military calls a "target-rich environment," so who knows what got him killed? The best comparisons that can be made are to the less well-known investigators Paul Wilcher or Danny Casolaro, or perhaps to another California Congressman, Leo Ryan.THE TABLOID COVER-UP OPERATIONOne can hardly argue that the American press has really done the proper job of a free press in a free society because these new revelations have, at least, been published by Globe. Rather, the opposite is more nearly the case. There is hardly any better way to discredit a serious story than to have it published in a tabloid, and only in a tabloid. This Globe story is quite similar to the National Enquirer story about the dubious "suicide" of Enron executive, Cliff Baxter, or the Star story about the George W. Bush-led fraternity at Yale branding pledges with hot coat hangers. It is well sourced and documented. One can bet that Bob Fletcher made a serious effort to get the story covered by "more respectable" news outlets, but was rebuffed.

The same "respectable" news organs are now continuing to cover up for the controlling criminal elite by blacking out what Globe has published. What is really impressive is how thoroughgoing and monolithic the whole operation is. The country is full of reporters who buy groceries in supermarkets just as I do. One would think that one of them, in one corner or other of this vast country, would spot the Sonny Bono article, would recognize the importance of the story, and would be able to prevail upon his or her editor to follow up on it. But it hasn't happened yet. For now it's much bigger news in Australia than it is here, and the odds are very long that not one peep about these Sonny Bono autopsy revelations will be heard anywhere from the American mainstream press.The same sort of blackout occurred when the former lead investigator for Kenneth Starr, Miquel Rodriguez, spilled the beans about the cover-up of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster's murder, and it happened when the official investigation of the "suicide" of America's first defense secretary, James Forrestal, was made public, and it will occur again.

David Martin,

April 6, 2008

Note: Bob Fletcher's investigative reports are available at P.O. Box 216, Bayview, Idaho 83803, Email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

The writer of the Globe article is Bob Burns, email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED
http://www.dcdave.com/article5/080406.htm

{the Andy Pero story, aka Mr.X...

Nazi Mind control and the Montauk Projects...}

Read the New Stuff just released to Think Aboutit

Click her to read the latest which will be explosive.

Parts:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19

Let me explain what this next batch is. this is a letter that Mike wrote to Matt Taibbi, Contributing Editor of "Rolling Stone".  He never heard back from him. Who knows if he even got the letter? All of this is part of a "Media Packet" that Mike sent to me. And pretty much just asked if I could get all this to as many people as I could. So, here we are.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Anyway, the next part is a letter to his lawyer

1

and a letter from his mother... 

1, 2, 3

Special thanks to Misty & Tim

Think AboutIt make no claims for the accuracy of this information and express's NO personal opinions on this subject. 

"COMPUTER BIG BROTHER STATE"

by Paul Baird

http://www.surveillanceissues.com/article_computerstate.pdf

There is no doubt that the global conquest which has been secretly carried out by the U.S based military/agency/corporate crime conglomerate would not have been possible without the vast capabilities of extremely advanced computer systems. These technologies certainly enable the U.S and its close allies to exert absolute control over many organisations and individuals including the worldwide mass media and all telecommunications networks. They thereby determine the ebb and flow of most information. Computer technology has also allowed the U.S and its allies to secretly amass space and ground-based weaponry which goes well beyond the knowledge or understanding of the general population. This equipment is used not so much on genuine enemies as it is on those innocent, concerned citizens who seek to address issues like the undue influence exercised by the crime conglomerate over global affairs; finance, politics, public opinion, weather and much more.

Now, the U.S and its close allies don't often exercise their full power, lest it raise suspicion, and when they do it's done without media coverage. However, that power extends to the point where whole systems can be quickly corrupted or shut down at the snap of a finger. Unbeknowns to most, the crime conglomerate has super computers capable of processing over 280 trillion calculations per second, EACH. Our minds do 5,000, so just one such computer could currently out perform every human mind put together, almost ten times over.

Many such computers are utilised to collect, collate, analyse, cross reference and disseminate information, all of which is gleaned from surveillance systems which are also far beyond those which the community recognises.

It's also important to note that satellite monitoring of ALL telecommunications, of countless face to face conversations and of the brain waves of many effectively drains the brains of the citizenry and feeds the thieving New World Order with valuable options, ideas, strategies and warnings. This thoroughly empowers the very real, very malevolent —Big Brother" to control what we think, feel, do and say. The ruling bodies that play this role do so on behalf of the 1,000 or so families which own 90% of the world's wealth and covet the other 10%; which is shared by the rest of us. We are merely mushroomed mental slaves to the megalomaniacs who have arranged this madness in secret.

Many writers have subtly alluded to this tragic situation but always in an unreal fantasy or sci fi setting so as to avoid censorship, victimisation etc. One such piece is the movie —The Matrix", wherein human beings live in pods, are used like computer batteries and are fed with distractive programming which becomes their lives. Those waking up to this trickery are subsequently persecuted by computer —agents". The alert reader will observe from what follows that there are frightening similarities between that inspired movie and the reality which awaits us if nothing is done to stop the current trend towards ever bigger conspiracies involving computer technology. The available technology already allows far too much which remains unpoliced. Anything from microwave towers to psychotronic weaponry to directed energy weapons and more can be (and is) used against members of the civilian population thanks to secretive computer/satellite technology. Computers are fine with reference to time-saving devices like home automation and calculators or —fun" devices like interactive games and they're especially helpful for transactions, various searches, communications and the like BUT the crime conglomerates uses are frightening; making the microchip the most significant and dangerous invention ever devised.

COLLECTING INFORMATION
The NSA's Echelon satellite system gathers intelligence from ALLtelecommunications, worldwide. The agencies then place —persons of interest" under constant audio/visual surveillance; via satellite. —Persons of interest" could be public figures, prominent businessmen, human rights campaigners, writers, inventors etc or they could be terrorists or other criminals. Regardless, instead of rounding up the criminals (which they could easily do) they use, protect or ignore most of them. Then they use their resources to harass, discredit or kill nuisances and —do-gooders" like whistleblowers, activists etc.

Also, more and more people are having their brain waves monitored, via satellite, with the results relayed to (and interpreted by) computers complete with brain wave vocabulary software. Yes they can read your mind and it's easy to do. It's only suppression of information and conditioning that makes that difficult for some to accept. In reality you have no privacy whatsoever and computers record and store it all.

In addition to these more covert methods you will be aware that simple closed circuit video surveillance can be carried out by employers, investigators, police and so on. These results can also be misused to embarrass/rob/ridicule, also turning the viewers into potential voyeurs, blackmailers or worse. There is also a wealth of information held by beaurocracies, corporations and more which is computer stored; available for referencing/transferring/altering. It's not only spy agencies that can lie or abuse authority.

Note that the stated reason for gathering intelligence is to ensure that national security is not compromised. However, satellite surveillance makes a mockery of that as they clearly know everything significant that's happening yet are selective about reacting to it all. That is, rather than preventing crime/terrorism the spy networks use pathetic excuses and their unquestioned authority to rob, persecute and destroy targeted persons whose knowledge/opinions threaten the operations and reputations of powerful criminals who are above the law.

Honest law enforcers have neither access to nor knowledge of such equipment and are therefore helpless when it comes to stopping the perpetrators who are usually based in the U.S, Britain, Israel etc. One of the more absurd, circular arguments for agencies to use such equipment against the civilian population is facilitated by a scam that works like this… One agency, or branch, harasses a target, another monitors the results (pretending they know nothing of the harassment) claiming the target has a problem and needs to be watched. This then ties up resources with a focus on innocent people who threaten criminals while criminals/terrorists roam freely. This is because criminals run the system when they really should be languishing in jail.

COLLATING INFORMATION
So, the supercomputers receive all the words, thoughts, actions and more relating to anyone that could have an impact on anything or anyone of any importance. That's not so difficult especially when you consider most of us don't ever do anything of great significance in our lives. However, to deal with those that dare to so much as —put their hand up"… every book, video, speech, every work, thought, action etc is scanned, downloaded and filed. Once your mind's around that truth then consider that this wealth of information can be sorted, summarized and categorized in such a way that statistics on individuals, groups, situations, countries and so on can be easily collated and analysed. Especially with precious, private memories being recorded and used you can imagine the possibilities for theft, provocation, blackmail, mind influence and more, even murder. Maybe now you can begin to see how diabolically evil all of this really is and why the megalomaniacs behind it systematically killed most of the scientists, public figures or spies who tried to inform the general public about it. And those of us who remain don't have the platform or authority to get the results needed. Equally, current whistleblower legislation doesn't protect the spies etc who wish to expose all of this evil to the general public. People have a right to know.

Basically put, the offenders play God by striving to possess all knowledge, to read and influence alert minds, to create and end life as they choose. Believe me, the new Reich may not be jack booting their way into our living rooms but they are just as dangerous as they act in secret and remain largely unopposed because of that.

CROSS REFERENCING
We all know that computer records can be linked between the police, the tax office, social security, corporations and so on but more worrying than the ensuing (minor) betrayals of personal privacy are the major betrayals effected when spies and other criminals actively harass civilian targets to keep them silent.

For example, take the practice of media surveillance feedback. 100's of 1,000's of targets can have their words/thoughts recorded such that similarities are highlighted through scripted material. With the targets reading/listening/viewing patterns also known the end result may be that one scripted line or comment or visual image delivered by a media outlet at a particular time could —hit" countless victims. Extend that system and you can see how victims couldn't even be sure that the media —hit" was meant for them. When you get to the point where the targets are so numerous that the media harassers don't even know their names then the media personnel can equate the targets (in their own minds) with a significant portion of the audience. Therefore some fail to even recognise their actions as personal attacks or crimes… or do they? Other cross referencing allows a myriad of correlated interferences to be carried out into people's lives and how they interact with one another. Remember the capacity of the computers in question. This would not be possible without them.

ANALYSING INTELLIGENCE
Human operatives (spies) working for the crime conglomerate enter the picture, (with computer monitoring and high-tech harassment) when persons of interest are highlighted. For targets who are not just watched but tortured they are placed in programs which are run remotely by those operatives. Strategies for oppression/torture are formulated based on circumstances, summarized case histories, thoughts/memories and more. Experts in psychiatry, deceit, torture, theft of intellectual property and murder are employed to remotely preoccupy, use, discredit or kill the victims on behalf of the crime conglomerate that rules the world. The favoured methods of assaults and analysis include on-the-ground interference as well as neurophone voices (placing threats, lies and distractions directly into the brain) and brain wave monitoring (enabling neurophone, and other, feedback to be more damaging). These methods also allow for tampering with and recording of dreams, memories, perceptions, beliefs and more. At this point deliberate misinterpretation of the results can take place especially by the media mafia who can invent whatever truth they want to go with. The resultant persecution forms part of certain —mind control" experiments which can last a lifetime.

Further, on misinterpretation, remember that the favoured methods include having one agency covertly harass someone while another monitors them, pretending there is no provocation. For the innocent this is galling and unfair but it tips over into the dangerous when this is done to terrorists, assassins and others that corrupt monitors can provoke/use to do their dirty work. When you mess with an innocent mind you get self defence but mess with a criminal mind and you could create mayhem.

DISSEMINATING THE INFORMATION
Computers can deliver surveillance results, combined with correlated —coincidental" material and harassment instructions, directly (via computer) to numerous groups that are part of the relevant crime networks. This is usually done from agency to media monitors, especially in the case of live-to-air media broadcasts. Alternatively, —ghost"/spook writers can be to blame; preparing material for entertainment scripts, edited books, political speeches etc. In other words, many spies are actually recruited/trained to work as (or with) public figures. The computers can then dredge up any coincidences when fed a line, a word, a scenario, an idea or so on that's gleaned from surveillance. It doesn't have to be humanly obvious such as a book/song/movie title, it can be a line from one of these or any reference that the target(s) will recognise so that they will be criminally harassed by it. This allows the editing of what's presented to deliver more hits per victim without the slightest risk of detection by anyone else, especially if the corresponding material is from the targets thoughts which no one else could verify. The feeling of this is like being mentally enslaved, gang raped and totally betrayed all at once. Public figures willingly participate in all of this, happily accepting that they have no editorial control over what they present which is often provided (at least in part) by spies and their advanced computers.

Newsreaders, singers, writers, politicians… basically none of them care. They're mostly criminals working for other criminals and they've all sold their souls for opportunity and money. All? Remember the computer assisted monitoring and sifting of people in public life and positions of influence. No one who would take a moral stance against these practises is welcome in their ranks.

So, briefly put, willingness to comply with criminal instruction, when required, is one of the prerequisites for success in public life. The wording, timing and presentation of ads, jokes, comments or anything can be spiked with computer-driven nonsense, propaganda and harassment material. This is often such a significant part of the content that it can ruin the impact of a broadcast or written piece. This practice is part of a system which uses the strutting egos of public figures to cover up some of the greatest crimes the world's ever endured (silently and mostly ignorantly). The entertainment industry itself is run by organised crime and it cooperates fully with military/agency thugs.

The agency criminals who puppeteer all of this also spread lies and rumours to destroy the targets and fuel the hatred of the harassers that they use. Of even greater concern is the fact that some targets are themselves criminals; terrorists, madmen. This allows the organisers of these oppressive programmes to discredit innocent victims by grouping them with those criminals AND it also allows them to use the criminal patsies to create an atmosphere of chaos/randomness, such that it helps to justify wars, ethnic persecution, reductions in democratic freedoms and anything else that generates greater wealth or control for their unseen masters. Most despots, terrorists, assassins and so on are, therefore, set up to do a job and then, if the timing's right, take the fall. The recent freeing of the mastermind of the Bali bombings is an interesting example. Why? Instead of stopping him they allowed the bombings, now they —insult" us by releasing him. Could this be orchestrated to help build up resentment towards these people; perhaps justifying future actions taken to oppress, rob or wipe out certain groups? Remember the surveillance systems I've outlined. Computer based monitoring is universal so no terrorist can plot anything without it being known… Agency acquiescence or provocation is necessary for anything to happen which is of major importance especially events like the New York World Trade Centre tragedy in 2001 or the Bali bombings. Things happen because —they" want them to. They want to rally support for the moves —they" want to make. One day something like this could lead to WWIII.

An example of smaller scale, but nonetheless significant, dissemination is the supplying of background information, neurophone visuals, subliminals, even monitored thoughts to so-called —psychics" who may be doing anything from running a money making scam to —solving" a murder. All —psychic" abilities are synthetic i.e. computer assisted. Everything else is trickery, experience and/or common sense.

THE LIES
Most conspiracies of silence or misinformation are also computer assisted. The control and suppression of information on many environmental dangers, scams and government/corporate/military offences keeps us all in the dark.

Secrecy orders are slapped on all inventions with military applications, secret deals are hatched and so on. It extends outwards until the only random events that exist, and the only matters properly reported to the public, are minor ones or ones caused by mother nature (when she's not assisted or framed by the crime conglomerates experiments and manipulations).

The media betrays and brainwashes us on anything from massacres/wars (and who causes them) to nonsense about aliens, psychics and the paranormal; all of which are phoney events staged using high tech deception and actors.

Another set of lies revolves around the crime conglomerates various money making/control operations. Take, for instance, pharmaceutical products which control or discredit certain sectors of the community. Some of the diseases they've invented (or caused) to do this include ADD, AIDS, ALZHEIMERS, SCHIZOPHRENIA and various —imported" flus. Many of the victims are experimental targets for the mad scientists of the New World Order, others are just pawns. EG 1 AIDS. This is used for genocide (eg Africa), vilification (eg Gays), social control (eg sex) and more. Who gains from that? Ask yourself why San Francisco's gay community was offered free Hep B shots at about the same time that AIDS was surfacing… and everyone that took advantage of this deal died… of AIDS. EG 2 PARANOID SCHIZOPHRENIA. This has been used by agency connected people to discredit, frighten and control whistleblowers for eons. Criminals will naturally defend themselves by calling their accusers mad but the brainwashing of the public with half truths about some victims who went off the rails has made this lie a powerful tool for oppression. So ask yourself why an absurdly high percentage of prisoners in N.S.W. jails are listed by prison psychiatrists as schizo' because they're hearing voices. It's actually caused by a widespread experimental programme employing neurophones designed to study and silence criminals who —know too much" about bigger criminals who roam free (eg a drug dealer who knows the —Mr Bigs" of the drug world and is considering —squealing"). Also isn't it an interesting coincidence that the average duration of such torments is 15 years; exactly the period psychiatrists are educated to believe that the condition exists. What they're not taught is that agencies/criminals use neurophones etc AND that the very term the psychiatrists rely on for their primary source of income was, in fact, invented by spy agency psychiatrists. Again, think. Some victims may go mad, some may be bad but all are targets of the crime conglomerate for one reason or another. Yet no one thinks to ask their history lest they see the reasons for the targeting. EG 3 ADD. This is probably the best understood example; one which most people immediately recognise as a cover. It's a cover for poor parenting, inept teaching, dangerous food additives and so on. It's a sick excuse for pharmaceutical companies and psychiatrists to intervene and take control/money from the source of a childs misery. Based on the checklist for ADD all kids have it. What a joke.

THE TRUTH
George Orwell said that —In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act" and those of us who have been branded by powerful criminals as —dangerously honest" know just what he meant. In particular, todays political and media entities operate in a thoroughly corrupt moral vacuum wherein they're sent into a tailspin of mirthful denial (and criminal defences) when faced with ANY truths that they don't want to deal with. Good at talking about what is right, they are happy to cover for themselves and their —associates". The same can be said for most senior religious and community leaders who participate in corrupt activity. Today, just as it was when Christ was crucified for speaking the truth, criticism of criminals in high places can lead to persecution and death.

So, anyone advocating the truth (in all things) will be treated as a pariah by our democratic —masters" and the empires that they rule. The truth has, in fact, been systematically and almost totally annihilated. In its place we have propaganda, distraction and nonsense. One simple example is the movie, —The Da Vinci Code". This was fed to the public with catch phrases like —Discover the truth". The very heavy promotion of that story was clearly an attempt to somehow undermine Christianity in response to the focus placed on the Jewish leaders' role in the death of Christ, as portrayed in the earlier movie, —The Passion of The Christ". That movie was attacked by —powerbrokers" and —critics" but proved to be hugely popular with audiences (the vast majority). Clearly with works like that, overreaction can spill over into lies and even criminal conduct. (The makers of the movie are currently being persecuted themselves). This is yet another example of God Almighty being attacked because of the almighty dollar. It makes you wonder if Christianity will one day rediscover a world of pain as people again hide from those who want the truth destroyed for fear of what it means for their criminal operations. Yet again, powerful minorities bully majorities into silence and so become the apparent majority —voice". And when honest people reject them and their lies they'll twist that into some sort of threat and maintain that they need to be watched (and tortured). This is clearly how their criminal minds work.

AN OPINION
No one should ever victimise minorities, be they black or white, Jew or Christian, short or tall… whatever, and especially not in a criminal fashion. Instead every honest voice should be heard so that people can decide for themselves. However, those secretly plotting ecocide, genocide and ethnic cleansing, wealth concentration through collusion, theft, deception or any other form of criminal conduct have the worst in them drawn out when they are confronted with the truth. As a result it is often the case that the best on offer, from whatever race, creed etc is discarded completely to hide the crimes of the monsters who secretly prey on society. The best? This could mean people, ideas, views… whatever —they" want to destroy. And it's all done while their front men smile —nicely" at us talking —nicely" about forgiving and forgetting. Normally to forgive and forget would be fine but in the face of a total lack of contrition and systematic, wilful, widespread criminal conduct that would not only be foolish but cowardly. No one has the right to commit crime and no one should give in to it or allow it. The perpetrators belong behind bars.

Yet again, computer technology supplies the preferred methods of arranging many things: accidents, disappearances, framings, discrediting, harassment and more. These things happen to those who know the truth. The rest of the population is controlled only because of their lack of knowledge of that truth. The problem is that —Big Brother" prevents those who know from telling too many people and he is far more malevolent than the glorified peep show —Big Brother" shown on TV. That show's main purpose is to get people to accept a lack of privacy before the true extent of the surveillance society becomes public knowledge. The real Big Brother is the enemy of the people, the enemy of the truth, the enemy of God. And God alone could help us if the biblical revelation about people carrying the mark of the beast (at the end of time) to even buy or sell somehow refers to compulsory implants orchestrated by a future world government (A 6ig 6rother 6ank perhaps?)

OTHER COMPUTER HORRORS
For most people the word —computer" conjures up just a few simple fears; the fear of change, the fear of unemployment, the sci fi nightmare of robots running amok and so on. The full truth is that available computer technology can already do many things. It can already cause earthquakes, hurricanes and lightning strikes using satellite or grand-based facilities like DARPA projects; eg the HAARP antenna farm in Alaska. Directed energy weapons can also (via laser) target any individuals organs, senses or brain function and inflict horrific injuries on targeted persons as well as destroying property. Also psychotronic weapons exist which can deliver brain violence; stalking, harassing and raping people psychologically. The monitoring of brain waves using satellite scanners and the feeding of the results to grand-based super computers allows brainwave vocabulary software to interpret thoughts precisely. These computers are located in places like the CIA's Langley Research Centre, Richmond, Virginia and the NSA/military/base at Fort Meade, Maryland. The gathered thoughts can be categorised, studied and fed back (via neurophone and media harassment) to neutralise targets, emotionally and psychologically. Memories, dreams, reactions and personalities can also be studied, removed and downloaded for long term computer records, robotics or clone brainwashing. Amazingly some wealthy people actually want the contents of their brains downloaded for posterity and they'll pay to have it done. The egotism, ignorance and criminality here is difficult to accept, on any level. On top of all this, thought influence/control is now possible not only through the propaganda and brainwashing of the mass media but also through the abuse of equipment like the computer-based technologies herein mentioned. The targets are the experiments upon which these methods have been (and will be) researched. Voice/thought transferred instruction can also be directed at robots or clones. In fact most things are possible including controlling peoples performances remotely (to fix sporting results, cause accidents and so on) and subliminally influencing their opinions (to skew election votes etc).

Further to the —anything's possible" claim, they can also camouflage, move or levitate objects (and people) making for more deceptive scenarios. One example is approximate invisibility; where technologies are employed to bend light around objects and/or cloaks or screens are projected onto the object using powerful video projectors etc. Another example is where objects float in the sky then apparently fly off quickly. It's all possible just not publicised because the military slaps secrecy orders on anything worth using (as soon as it's invented) then they use it to deceive and abuse people. In fact, when you take a glimpse at the arsenal of experimental/perfected weapons secretly used against the citizenry it's easy to see how total chaos or total control could easily be orchestrated. Our apparently random world is actually very tightly controlled.

Meanwhile environmental, peace and disarmament activists, truth/privacy advocates, major whistleblowers and banned writers all suffer and die thanks to these technologies. That includes the carcinogenic and neuro-degenerative side effects of the constant exposure to the entertainment frequencies that are so cruelly used on them 24/7. Unfortunately Big Brother's conditioning and behaviour modification controls not only kill the truth but those presenting it…often slowly. They do not want people informed of their misuses of technology or their long term plans which include destroying certain cultures through hatred and war as well as the long term halving (or worse) of the worlds population.This then would leave the ruling classes to control all wealth and natural resources; marginalising the —have nots" that survive.

DISTRACTIONS
Whilst many activities have their place in society some can also be used as diversions or controls. Anything that preoccupies peoples thoughts and focuses their attention on something other than important matters and truths can be used in this way… Consumerism, drugs, sex… anything that works (and makes money)… anything that —dumbs down" the population. Meantime the computer crimes mentioned herein go on without detection. Examples of diversions include the following:-

(i) Celebrity fixation œ The whole celebrity circus thing is a cover for some of the biggest cons and betrayals in human history. People are fascinated by, and often put their misplaced trust in, egocentric public figures who have no real social conscience. It couldn't be worse if mind controlled clones or soulless androids had replaced all public figures and were directed from spook central to do whatever, right or wrong, because that's what they do; whatever they're told. Entrained to worship celebrity, even to crave celebrity themselves, the general public are made oblivious to the fact that the 1,000 or so families which control the world, including the media, are members of the Illuminati, The Bilderberg club, etc. They actually use celebrities to channel opinions, control wealth and much, much more, all on their behalf.

(ii) Sex and drugs œ These are two of the more effective means of compromising integrity. It's all about control and money (in that order); control of public figures and the public. For instance, along with the money, time, access, adulation and pressure that comes with public figure status there is usually bargaining, compromise and control. E.g. The mere fact that many celebrities take advantage of underage groupies makes them guilty of paedophilia and therefore blackmailable yet few have ever been charged. Why? Because they do as they're told; they cooperate. Drugs in particular make people susceptible to corrupt suggestions and focus individuals on themselves to the point where they gradually care less and less about how their actions effect others. There wouldn't be many druggies or sex maniacs who weren't criminally minded. However, for every person in a —high" place that's charged, 1000's are never even questioned. Add this to the mix, throw in association with computer assisted spies, certain —above the law" powers and so on and you have a recipe for heinous, oppressive conduct which can be aimed at those opposing high level crime.

(iii) Religion œ Aside from marginalised extremist groups (which certainly capture the attention of their members) there are mainstream religions which can act as an opiate for the honest masses. To have us all just quietly pursuing our own salvation is ideal for —them". They don't want people trying to stop evil. In fact, thinking about the many vital issues which the churches ignore for political reasons I'm reminded of the old Edmund Burke saying regarding evil triumphing when men of goodwill do nothing. The founder of our Christian church, Jesus Christ, certainly criticised hypocrites and those enslaved by the love of money and he paid the price for doing so. However I seem to remember he instructed us to follow his lead. So why don't we?... Distractions? Fear? We should not be deterred by apathy or the fear of those who laugh at us for caring. They do this to silence us and hide their crimes without so much as a challenge to check their criminal progress.

AN OPINION
Even in the western democracies any resistance to the mass media's manipulation of community standards and views can meet with brutal victimisation. Yet often the popular views publicly professed by celebrities are at odds with their own lifestyles. Fair, non-partisan exchanges of views are discouraged as are those who would suggest such a thing. So, what we get instead is anything but genuine. Any discussion that will lead to criticism of powerful criminals is stymied. Even the churches will not foster such criticism being beholden to wealthy —businessmen" and MP's for grants, favourable media presentation etc. Again, as with state police who are instructed to focus on the proverbial droppers of bubble gum wrappers whilst corporate criminals and murderers roam free, the spy agencies focus on silencing honest people leaving them with no resources to deal with the terrorists/criminals that they actually want to use rather than stop. In other words, our limited law enforcement resources are deliberately misallocated.

The Georgia Guidestones may be the most enigmatic monument in the US: huge slabs of granite, inscribed with directions for rebuilding civilization after the apocalypse. Only one man knows who created them—and he's not talking.

Photo: Dan Winters

 

The strangest monument in America looms over a barren knoll in northeastern Georgia. Five massive slabs of polished granite rise out of the earth in a star pattern. The rocks are each 16 feet tall, with four of them weighing more than 20 tons apiece. Together they support a 25,000-pound capstone. Approaching the edifice, it's hard not to think immediately of England's Stonehenge or possibly the ominous monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Built in 1980, these pale gray rocks are quietly awaiting the end of the world as we know it.

Called the Georgia Guidestones, the monument is a mystery—nobody knows exactly who commissioned it or why. The only clues to its origin are on a nearby plaque on the ground—which gives the dimensions and explains a series of intricate notches and holes that correspond to the movements of the sun and stars—and the "guides" themselves, directives carved into the rocks. These instructions appear in eight languages ranging from English to Swahili and reflect a peculiar New Age ideology. Some are vaguely eugenic (guide reproduction wisely—improving fitness and diversity); others prescribe standard-issue hippie mysticism (prize truth—beauty—love—seeking harmony with the infinite).

What's most widely agreed upon—based on the evidence available—is that the Guidestones are meant to instruct the dazed survivors of some impending apocalypse as they attempt to reconstitute civilization. Not everyone is comfortable with this notion. A few days before I visited, the stones had been splattered with polyurethane and spray-painted with graffiti, including slogans like "Death to the new world order." This defacement was the first serious act of vandalism in the Guidestones' history, but it was hardly the first objection to their existence. In fact, for more than three decades this uncanny structure in the heart of the Bible Belt has been generating responses that range from enchantment to horror. Supporters (notable among them Yoko Ono) have praised the messages as a stirring call to rational thinking, akin to Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason. Opponents have attacked them as the Ten Commandments of the Antichrist.

Whoever the anonymous architects of the Guidestones were, they knew what they were doing: The monument is a highly engineered structure that flawlessly tracks the sun. It also manages to engender endless fascination, thanks to a carefully orchestrated aura of mystery. And the stones have attracted plenty of devotees to defend against folks who would like them destroyed. Clearly, whoever had the monument placed here understood one thing very well: People prize what they don't understand at least as much as what they do.

The story of the Georgia Guidestones began on a Friday afternoon in June 1979, when an elegant gray-haired gentleman showed up in Elbert County, made his way to the offices of Elberton Granite Finishing, and introduced himself as Robert C. Christian. He claimed to represent "a small group of loyal Americans" who had been planning the installation of an unusually large and complex stone monument. Christian had come to Elberton—the county seat and the granite capital of the world—because he believed its quarries produced the finest stone on the planet.

Joe Fendley, Elberton Granite's president, nodded absently, distracted by the rush to complete his weekly payroll. But when Christian began to describe the monument he had in mind, Fendley stopped what he was doing. Not only was the man asking for stones larger than any that had been quarried in the county, he also wanted them cut, finished, and assembled into some kind of enormous astronomical instrument.

What in the world would it be for? Fendley asked. Christian explained that the structure he had in mind would serve as a compass, calendar, and clock. It would also need to be engraved with a set of guides written in eight of the world's major languages. And it had to be capable of withstanding the most catastrophic events, so that the shattered remnants of humanity would be able to use those guides to reestablish a better civilization than the one that was about to destroy itself.

Monumental Precision

Built to survive the apocalypse, the Georgia Guidestones are not merely instructions for the future—the massive granite slabs also function as a clock, calendar, and compass.

The monument sits at the highest point in Elbert County and is oriented to track the sun's east-west migration year-round.

On an equinox or solstice, visitors who stand at the west side of the "mail slot" are positioned to see the sun rise on the horizon.

An eye-level hole drilled into the center support stone allows stargazers on the south side to locate Polaris, the North Star.

A 7/8-inch hole drilled through the capstone focuses a sunbeam on the center column and at noon pinpoints the day of the year.

Text: Erik Malinowski; illustration: Steve Sanford

Fendley is now deceased, but shortly after the Guidestones went up, an Atlanta television reporter asked what he was thinking when he first heard Christian's plan. "I was thinking, 'I got a nut in here now. How am I going get him out?'" Fendley said. He attempted to discourage the man by quoting him a price several times higher than for any project commissioned there before. The job would require special tools, heavy equipment, and paid consultants, Fendley explained. But Christian merely nodded and asked how long it would take. Fendley didn't rightly know—six months, at least. He wouldn't be able to even consider such an undertaking, he added, until he knew it could be paid for. When Christian asked whether there was a banker in town he considered trustworthy, Fendley saw his chance to unload the strange man and sent him to look for Wyatt Martin, president of the Granite City Bank.

The tall and courtly Martin—the only man in Elberton besides Fendley known to have met R. C. Christian face-to-face—is now 78. "Fendley called me and said, 'A kook over here wants some kind of crazy monument,'" Martin says. "But when this fella showed up he was wearing a very nice, expensive suit, which made me take him a little more seriously. And he was well-spoken, obviously an educated person." Martin was naturally taken aback when the man told him straight out that R. C. Christian was a pseudonym. He added that his group had been planning this secretly for 20 years and wanted to remain anonymous forever. "And when he told me what it was he and this group wanted to do, I just about fell over," Martin says. "I told him, 'I believe you'd be just as well off to take the money and throw it out in the street into the gutters.' He just sort of looked at me and shook his head, like he felt kinda sorry for me, and said, 'You don't understand.'"

Martin led Christian down the street to the town square, where the city had commissioned a towering Bicentennial Memorial Fountain, which included a ring of 13 granite panels, each roughly 2 by 3 feet, signifying the original colonies. "I told him that was about the biggest project ever undertaken around here, and it was nothing compared to what he was talking about," Martin says. "That didn't seem to bother him at all." Promising to return on Monday, the man went off to charter a plane and spend the weekend scouting locations from the air. "By then I half believed him," Martin says.

When Christian came back to the bank Monday, Martin explained that he could not proceed unless he could verify the man's true identity and "get some assurance you can pay for this thing." Eventually, the two negotiated an agreement: Christian would reveal his real name on the condition that Martin promise to serve as his sole intermediary, sign a confidentiality agreement pledging never to disclose the information to another living soul, and agree to destroy all documents and records related to the project when it was finished. "He said he was going to send the money from different banks across the country," Martin says, "because he wanted to make sure it couldn't be traced. He made it clear that he was very serious about secrecy."

Before leaving town, Christian met again with Fendley and presented the contractor with a shoe box containing a wooden model of the monument he wanted, plus 10 or so pages of detailed specifications. Fendley accepted the model and instructions but remained skeptical until Martin phoned the following Friday to say he had just received a $10,000 deposit. After that, Fendley stopped questioning and started working. "My daddy loved a challenge," says Fendley's daughter, Melissa Fendley Caruso, "and he said this was the most challenging project in the history of Elbert County."

Construction of the Guidestones got under way later that summer. Fendley's company lovingly documented the progress of the work in hundreds of photographs. Jackhammers were used to gouge 114 feet into the rock at Pyramid Quarry, searching for hunks of granite big enough to yield the final stones. Fendley and his crew held their breath when the first 28-ton slab was lifted to the surface, wondering if their derricks would buckle under the weight. A special burner (essentially a narrowly focused rocket motor used to cut and finish large blocks of granite) was trucked to Elberton to clean and size the stones, and a pair of master stonecutters was hired to smooth them.

Fendley and Martin helped Christian find a suitable site for the Guidestones in Elbert County: a flat-topped hill rising above the pastures of the Double 7 Farms, with vistas in all directions. For $5,000, owner Wayne Mullinex signed over a 5-acre plot. In addition to the payment, Christian granted lifetime cattle-grazing rights to Mullinex and his children, and Mullinex's construction company got to lay the foundation for the Guidestones.

With the purchase of the land, the Guidestones' future was set. Christian said good-bye to Fendley at the granite company office, adding, "You'll never see me again." Christian then turned and walked out the door—without so much as a handshake.

From then on, Christian communicated solely through Martin, writing a few weeks later to ask that ownership of the land and monument be transferred to Elbert County, which still holds it. Christian reasoned that civic pride would protect it over time. "All of Mr. Christian's correspondence came from different cities around the country," Martin says. "He never sent anything from the same place twice."

The astrological specifications for the Guidestones were so complex that Fendley had to retain the services of an astronomer from the University of Georgia to help implement the design. The four outer stones were to be oriented based on the limits of the sun's yearly migration. The center column needed two precisely calibrated features: a hole through which the North Star would be visible at all times, and a slot that was to align with the position of the rising sun during the solstices and equinoxes. The principal component of the capstone was a 7\8-inch aperture through which a beam of sunlight would pass at noon each day, shining on the center stone to indicate the day of the year.

The main feature of the monument, though, would be the 10 dictates carved into both faces of the outer stones, in eight languages: English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, and Swahili. A mission statement of sorts (let these be guidestones to an age of reason) was also to be engraved on the sides of the capstone in Egyptian hieroglyphics, classical Greek, Sanskrit, and Babylonian cuneiform. The United Nations provided some of the translations (including those for the dead languages), which were stenciled onto the stones and etched with a sandblaster.

By early 1980, a bulldozer was scraping the Double 7 hilltop to bedrock, where five granite slabs serving as a foundation were laid out in a paddle-wheel design. A 100-foot-tall crane was used to lift the stones into place. Each of the outer rocks was 16 feet 4 inches high, 6 feet 6 inches wide, and 1 foot 7 inches thick. The center column was the same (except only half the width), and the capstone measured 9 feet 8 inches long, 6 feet 6 inches wide, and 1 foot 7 inches thick. Including the foundation stones, the monument's total weight was almost 240,000 pounds. Covered with sheets of black plastic in preparation for an unveiling on the vernal equinox, the Guidestones towered over the cattle that continued to graze beneath it at the approach of winter's end.

The monument ignited controversy before it was even finished. The first rumor began among members of the Elberton Granite Association, jealous of the attention being showered on one of their own: Fendley was behind the whole thing, they said, aided by his friend Martin, the banker. The gossip became so poisonous that the two men agreed to take a lie detector test at the Elberton Civic Center. The scandal withered when The Elberton Star reported that they had both passed convincingly, but the publicity brought a new wave of complaints. As word of what was being inscribed spread, Martin recalls, even people he considered friends asked him why he was doing the devil's work. A local minister, James Travenstead, predicted that "occult groups" would flock to the Guidestones, warning that "someday a sacrifice will take place here." Those inclined to agree were hardly discouraged by Charlie Clamp, the sandblaster charged with carving each of the 4,000-plus characters on the stones: During the hundreds of hours he spent etching the guides, Clamp said, he had been constantly distracted by "strange music and disjointed voices."

The unveiling on March 22, 1980, was a community celebration. Congressmember Doug Barnard, whose district contained Elberton, addressed a crowd of 400 that flowed down the hillside and included television news crews from Atlanta. Soon Joe Fendley was the most famous Elbertonian since Daniel Tucker, the 18th-century minister memorialized in the folk song "Old Dan Tucker." Bounded by the Savannah and Broad rivers but miles from the nearest interstate—"as rural as rural can be," in the words of current Star publisher Gary Jones—Elberton was suddenly a tourist destination, with visitors from all over the world showing up to see the Guidestones. "We'd have people from Japan and China and India and everywhere wanting to go up and see the monument," Martin says. And Fendley's boast that he had "put Elberton on the map" was affirmed literally in spring 2005, when National Geographic Traveler listed the Guidestones as a feature in its Geotourism MapGuide to Appalachia.

But many who read what was written on the stones were unsettled. Guide number one was, of course, the real stopper: maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature. There were already 4.5 billion people on the planet, meaning eight out of nine had to go (today it would be closer to 12 out of 13). This instruction was echoed and expanded by tenet number two: guide reproduction wisely—improving fitness and diversity. It didn't take a great deal of imagination to draw an analogy to the practices of, among others, the Nazis. Guide number three instructed readers to unite humanity with a living new language. This sent a shiver up the spine of local ministers who knew that the Book of Revelations warned of a common tongue and a one-world government as the accomplishments of the Antichrist. Guide number four—rule passion—faith—tradition—and all things with tempered reason—was similarly threatening to Christians committed to the primacy of faith over all. The last six guides were homiletic by comparison. protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts. let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court. avoid petty laws and useless officials. balance personal rights with social duties. prize truth—beauty—love—seeking harmony with the infinite. be not a cancer on the earth—leave room for nature—leave room for nature.

Even as locals debated the relative merits of these commandments, the dire predictions of Travenstead seemed to be coming true. Within a few months, a coven of witches from Atlanta adopted the Guidestones as their home away from home, making weekend pilgrimages to Elberton to stage various pagan rites ("dancing and chanting and all that kind of thing," Martin says) and at least one warlock-witch marriage ceremony. No humans were sacrificed on the altar of the stones, but there are rumors that several chickens were beheaded. A 1981 article in the monthly magazine UFO Report cited Naunie Batchelder (identified in the story as "a noted Atlanta psychic") as predicting that the true purpose of the guides would be revealed "within the next 30 years." Viewed from directly overhead, the Guidestones formed an X, the piece in UFO Report observed, making for a perfect landing site.

Visitors kept coming, but after several failed investigations into the identity of R. C. Christian, the media lost interest. Curiosity flared again briefly in 1993, when Yoko Ono contributed a track called "Georgia Stone" to a tribute album for avant-garde composer John Cage, with Ono chanting the 10th and final guide nearly verbatim: "Be not a cancer on Earth—leave room for nature—leave room for nature." A decade later, however, when comedienne Roseanne Barr tried to work a bit on the Guidestones into her comeback tour, nobody seemed to care.

Christian kept in touch with Martin, writing the banker so regularly that they became pen pals. Occasionally, Christian would call from a pay phone at the Atlanta airport to say he was in the area, and the two would rendezvous for dinner in the college town of Athens, a 40-mile drive west of Elberton. By this time, Martin no longer questioned Christian's secrecy. The older man had successfully deflected Martin's curiosity when the two first met, by quoting Henry James' observations of Stonehenge: "You may put a hundred questions to these rough-hewn giants as they bend in grim contemplation of their fallen companions, but your curiosity falls dead in the vast sunny stillness that enshrouds them." Christian "never would tell me a thing about this group he belonged to," Martin says. The banker received his last letter from Christian right around the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and assumes the man—who would have been in his mid-eighties—has since passed away.

The mysterious story of R. C. Christian and the absence of information about the true meaning of the Guidestones was bound to become an irresistible draw for conspiracy theorists and "investigators" of all kinds. Not surprisingly, three decades later there is no shortage of observers rushing to fill the void with all sorts of explanations.

Among them is an activist named Mark Dice, author of a book called The Resistance Manifesto. In 2005, Dice (who was using a pseudonym of his own—"John Conner"—appropriated from the Terminator franchise's main character) began to demand that the Guidestones be "smashed into a million pieces." He claims that the monument has "a deep Satanic origin," a stance that has earned him plenty of coverage, both in print and on the Web. According to Dice, Christian was a high-ranking member of "a Luciferian secret society" at the forefront of the New World Order. "The elite are planning to develop successful life-extension technology in the next few decades that will nearly stop the aging process," Dice says, "and they fear that with the current population of Earth so high, the masses will be using resources that the elite want for themselves. The Guidestones are the New World Order's Ten Commandments. They're also a way for the elite to get a laugh at the expense of the uninformed masses, as their agenda stands as clear as day and the zombies don't even notice it."

Ironically, Dice's message has mainly produced greater publicity for the Guidestones. This, in turn, has brought fresh visitors to the monument and made Elbert County officials even less inclined to remove the area's only major tourist attraction.

Phyllis Brooks, who runs the Elbert County Chamber of Commerce, pronounced herself aghast last November when the Guidestones were attacked by vandals for the first time ever. While Dice denies any involvement in the assault, he seems to have inspired it: Spray-painted on the stones were messages like "Jesus will beat u satanist" and "No one world government." Other defacements asserted that the Council on Foreign Relations is "ran by the devil," that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job, and that President Obama is a Muslim. The vandals also splashed the Guidestones with polyurethane, which is much more difficult to remove than paint. Despite the graffiti's alignment with his views, Dice says he disapproves of the acts. "A lot of people were glad such a thing happened and saw it as standing up against the New World Order," Dice says, "while others who are unhappy with the stones saw the actions as counterproductive and inappropriate."

Martin winces every time he hears Dice's "Luciferian secret society" take on the Guidestones. But while he disagrees, he also admits that he doesn't know for sure. "All I can tell you is that Mr. Christian always seemed a very decent and sincere fella to me."

Dice, of course, is far from the only person with a theory about the Guidestones. Jay Weidner, a former Seattle radio commentator turned erudite conspiracy hunter, has heavily invested time and energy into one of the most popular hypotheses. He argues that Christian and his associates were Rosicrucians, followers of the Order of the Rosy Cross, a secret society of mystics that originated in late medieval Germany and claim understanding of esoteric truths about nature, the universe, and the spiritual realm that have been concealed from ordinary people. Weidner considers the name R. C. Christian an homage to the legendary 14th-century founder of the Rosicrucians, a man first identified as Frater C.R.C. and later as Christian Rosenkreuz. Secrecy, Weidner notes, has been a hallmark of the Rosicrucians, a group that announced itself to the world in the early 17th century with a pair of anonymous manifestos that created a huge stir across Europe, despite the fact that no one was ever able to identify a single member. While the guides on the Georgia stones fly in the face of orthodox Christian eschatology, they conform quite well to the tenets of Rosicrucianism, which stress reason and endorse a harmonic relationship with nature.

Weidner also has a theory about the purpose of the Guidestones. An authority on the hermetic and alchemical traditions that spawned the Rosicrucians, he believes that for generations the group has been passing down knowledge of a solar cycle that climaxes every 13,000 years. During this culmination, outsize coronal mass ejections are supposed to devastate Earth. Meanwhile, the shadowy organization behind the Guidestones is now orchestrating a "planetary chaos," Weidner believes, that began with the recent collapse of the US financial system and will result eventually in major disruptions of oil and food supplies, mass riots, and ethnic wars worldwide, all leading up to the Big Event on December 21, 2012. "They want to get the population down," Weidner says, "and this is what they think will do it. The Guidestones are there to instruct the survivors."

On hearing Weidner's ideas, Martin shakes his head and says it's "the sort of thing that makes me want to tell people everything I know." Martin has long since retired from banking and no longer lives in Elberton, yet he's still the Guidestones' official—and only—secret-keeper. "But I can't tell," the old man quickly adds. "I made a promise." Martin also made a promise to destroy all the records of his dealings with Christian, though he hasn't kept that one—at least not yet. In the back of his garage is a large plastic bin (actually, the hard-sided case of an IBM computer he bought back in 1983) stuffed with every document connected to the Guidestones that ever came into his possession, including the letters from Christian.

For years Martin thought he might write a book, but now he knows he probably won't. What he also won't do is allow me to look through the papers. When I ask whether he's prepared to take what he knows to his grave, Martin replies that Christian would want him to do just that: "All along, he said that who he was and where he came from had to be kept a secret. He said mysteries work that way. If you want to keep people interested, you can let them know only so much." The rest is enshrouded in the vast sunny stillness.

Randall Sullivan ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) wrote about the electric-vehicle company ZAP in issue 16.04.

At the Edge of the Abyss

by Gary North

This week has been filled with surprises. It began with bad news for international stock markets. It got rolling with unprecedented news from the Federal Reserve System. It got wild with nutty news from a bureaucrat in New York. Then it settled down to wild swings on the American stock market.

All in all, this week was a sign that the economy is headed toward the falls. Keep close watch on the canoe 100 yards ahead of you. If, without warning, it disappears, start paddling for the shore. Either shore. Fast.

On Monday, Americans were home, celebrating the birth of Martin Luther King. Well, maybe not celebrating. But home.

The American stock markets were closed. That left foreign markets to set the pace. They fell. They looked like they were in free-fall. Then, the next day – day two for them – they fell again, only worse.

Fifteen minutes before the New York Stock Exchange opened, there was an announcement from the Federal Reserve System. The Federal Open Market Committee had met in secret the night before and had voted, 8 to 1, to lower the target rate for the Federal Funds rate by three quarters of a point: 75 basis points, as they call it in the trade.

First, this announcement came a week before the scheduled meeting of the FOMC. This was unprecedented. Second, the FOMC met secretly overnight. Third, the rate cut was the largest single cut in over two decades. Fourth, the announcement came 15 minutes before the market opened.

What does this tell us? This: eight of the nine members of the FOMC thought the stock market was about to collapse. This was a panic move by eight frightened men in the face of a potential panic sell-off by frightened mutual fund managers, on behalf of frightened investors who would start selling as soon as the market opened.

This is exactly what happened. Sell orders from the day before were executed. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell like a stone by 450 points. This carried the Dow below its high in March, 2000, officially wiping out all profits for eight years, not counting the 21% loss due to price inflation, i.e., lower purchasing power.

Then the market turned. Oh, joy: the FOMC had intervened to save the stock market! Up, up, up it went, almost to the opening price. Then it fell 170 points. Then it rebounded almost to break-even. Then it fell. Then it rebounded. Then it fell. It wound up down by 128. Whew! Saved by the FED!

Overnight (for us), stocks rebounded in Asia (day three). There was one cause: confidence that the FOMC's action would save America from a recession. Asia's markets recovered most of what they had lost for two days.

This recovery was extremely important, but not for reasons offered. It revealed that Asian stock markets are completely dependent on the Asian investors' perception of America's economy. This means that if the U.S. stock market falls, Asia's stock markets will fall. The economies are interlinked. But America's economy is the tail that wags the dog.

SOROS' WARNING

George Soros doesn't think so. I hate to argue with the multi-billionaire currency futures guru, but what happened this week says he's wrong.

On Tuesday, he gave a speech in Davos, Switzerland at the annual Davos summit. He said that America is clearly headed for a recession. He also said that Asia isn't.

He added this: the U.S. dollar is now being abandoned by central banks. It will no longer be the world's exclusive reserve currency. Bloomberg reported:

"The current crisis is not only the bust that follows the housing boom, it's basically the end of a 60-year period of continuing credit expansion based on the dollar as the reserve currency," Soros said in a debate today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "Now the rest of the world is increasingly unwilling to accumulate dollars."

This is true, but this has been going on for several years, as I have noted before. This quiet abandonment of the dollar, not America's price inflation (low) or monetary inflation (zero in recent years – M-1), is why the dollar has been falling and gold has been rising.

A recession is almost certain in the United States, he said. But he is optimistic about the world's economy.

"I think it is almost inevitable that the turmoil in the financial markets will affect the real economy," said the founder of New York-based hedge-fund firm Soros Fund Management LLC, which has $17 billion in assets. China and India are benefiting from globalization to a degree that "I don't expect a global recession," he added.

While I don't control $17 billion in assets – why, not even 10% of this – I think he is wrong. I think what happened early this week indicated how wrong he is. The world's stock markets went into a tailspin on the threat of a U.S. recession. Then most of them recovered because of the supposed ability of the FED to avoid a recession here.

Why would the stock markets move in lock step if the underlying economies were not so tightly intertwined that a fall in demand from the United States will not spread?

Here is one possible response: "If China's economy is growing at 10%, why should a 1% or even 2% decline in the U.S. economy pull down China?" Here is my answer.

CHINA'S BOOM

China's central bank has already announced that it will take steps the control price inflation. A Reuters story on December 30 announced:

China's central bank will implement a tight monetary policy in 2008, using a range of tools to keep a check on liquidity, the central bank governor, Zhou Xiaochuan, reaffirmed.

The People's Bank of China has waged a war on excess liquidity and inflation in 2007, raising interest rates six times and increasing the proportion of deposits that banks must hold in reserve 10 times, to a record level. Still, annual consumer inflation is running at the quickest pace in over a decade, and many economists are concerned that it could spill over from food into the broader economy.

The imagery of faithful central bankers waging war on inflation is as inspiring as the image of Alan Greenspan waging war on investment bubbles. The economic boom in China has been created in large part by the central bank, which has inflated M-1 at rates in the range of 17% to 19% for years.

For China's central bankers to warn about price inflation is comparable to the warnings from the Federal Reserve's spokesmen regarding price inflation. In both cases, the central banks are the exclusive cause of the price inflation. From 1938 until now, there has been only one year – 1955 – where America's prices fell, and then by only 1%. That is because the FED has increased the money supply every year since 1933.

At some point, China's central bank will be successful in slowing price inflation. The economic boom requires ever-larger percentage increases of the money supply. By merely following the policies of the previous year, the central bank will produce a recession. If the central bank is serious about slowing inflation through interest rate increases, it will see its goal achieved. Price inflation will in fact slow. The cause of the slowdown will be a recession in China.

What could trigger this? A recession in the United States could. Falling demand for the goods produced by China's export sector will produce bankruptcies in China. They will order no more goods and services. These effects will ripple through the Chinese economy. In the absence of the recessionary efforts of central bank policy, these ripples could be contained by growth in the other sectors. But a reduction of Chinese economic growth is already in the pipeline. The central bank's policy of letting interest rates rise are sufficient to create a domestic recession.

When China goes into recession, assuming the U.S. is also in recession, the whole world will go into recession. This is why I think Soros is wrong. The crisis in the subprime market is spreading to the corporate bond market. The bond insurers are facing bankruptcy. This will lower the ratings of the bonds held by banks all over the world.

This leads me to Wednesday's stock market reversal.

THE 600-POINT RUMOR

The Dow opened Wednesday in panic sell-off mode. It opened at 11,950. It gapped down in one shot to 11,750. Then it fell to 11,700. Then it went back up almost to 11,850. Then it steadily retreated to 11,650. That was just before 1 p.m. Then it reversed. Up, up, up it went. It closed at 12,200. The move was in the range of 600 points, and was reported as such by the press.

What could cause such a reversal? Only after the market closed did the general public find out.

At about 1 p.m., there was a report issued by the office of the New York State Insurance Department. The head of the Department had called a meeting of New York bankers, which was beginning. London's Financial Times described what happened next.

Leading US banks are under pressure from New York state's insurance regulator to provide as much as $15bn to support struggling bond insurers, people familiar with the matter said on Wednesday night.

Eric Dinallo, New York insurance superintendent, held a two-hour meeting with bank executives on Wednesday and urged them to provide as much as $5bn in initial capital to support the insurers – the largest of which are MBIA and Ambac – and ultimately to commit up to $15bn.

Consider what this meeting was about. Companies that have issued insurance contracts to cover for losses in bond holdings are now threatened with bankruptcy because of the turmoil in the subprime credit markets and also the huge market called credit default swaps. These companies may not have enough money in reserve to cover the losses. Their stock market value had tumbled. They were facing bankruptcy. (In my view, they still are.)

Who are the parties who have paid premiums for this insurance? Banks, mainly. Hedge funds are also on the other side of the contracts. If these insurers go belly-up, the market value of the formerly insured bonds will fall. This will create losses for the banks and hedge funds – potentially gigantic losses.

So, the head of the state insurance department called in bankers – whose portfolios are at risk by the bankruptcy of the insurers – and suggested that the pony up as much as $15 billion to cover the losses of the insurers.

Got that? The insured are supposed to insure the insurers against loss. Why? Because if the insurers go belly-up, the banks will experience a loss.

This sounds crazy. But it makes sense under this scenario: the collapse of the bond market threatens the banks by a lot more than $15 billion. If the banks called in are facing losses so huge that $15 billion looks like a bargain, can you visualize what the threat is internationally? After all, the commissioner did not call in banks from outside New York.

The International Herald Tribune, owned by the New York Times, reported on January 24 that the threat of default is creating widespread concern.

Regulators fear a possible chain of events in which the troubled bond insurers, MBIA and Ambac, might be unable to keep their promise to pay investors if borrowers default on their debt.

That could leave the buyers of the bonds – including many banks and pension funds – on the hook for untold billions of dollars in losses, shaking confidence in the financial system.

It was in this context that the discussion of a $15b bail-out took place.

The notion that the failure of even one big bond insurer might touch off a chain reaction of losses across the financial world has unnerved Wall Street and Washington. It was a factor in the Federal Reserve's decision on Tuesday to calm investors by reducing interest rates by three-quarters of a point, to 3.5 percent.

The bond-insurance industry has never before been threatened by a failure of major bond insurers. It has been a low-risk industry, the article reports. Not any more.

"Regulators are furiously trying to come up with a plan," said Rob Haines, an analyst at CreditSights, a research firm, who was not at the meeting. . . .

While $15 billion might seem like a large amount of money for banks to commit to bond guarantors at a time when many investors have lost faith in them, Haines said it would be smaller than the billions the banks might have to write down if the companies lost their top ratings or incurred major losses.

"It's a calculated kind of risk," he said.

A spokesman for Ambac did not return calls seeking comment. A spokeswoman for MBIA declined to comment.

What are we talking about in terms of potential losses?

MBIA has estimated that in the worst case, which it described as a one in 10,000 event, it expects to incur losses of $10 billion, a fraction of the $673 billion it has insured.

I don't know about you, but when I read "$673 billion," insured by a single company in the industry, I grow nervous. Sorry, but I do.

I also think: "What kind of people paid premiums to a company to insure $673 billion worth of bonds?"

Answer: the best and the brightest, the people whose decisions have laid the foundations of the present crisis, which, if it occurs, will re-shape the world's economic system. You know: people like Charles Prince, the former CEO of America's second largest bank, under whose administration, Citigroup has lost (so far) an admitted $18 billion.

My conclusion: The international capital markets are at the edge of the abyss.

The article in the Financial Times added this information.

People familiar with the matter said the specifics of a possible capital infusion had yet to be decided, but contributions would not necessarily be based on how much exposure each bank has to bond insurers.

Some participants in the meeting described the discussions as at an early stage.

Let me summarize. A bureaucrat in charge of regulating MBIA calls in New York bankers to discuss a bail-out totalling (initially) $15 billion. There are no specifics announced. This is only a preliminary discussion. Result: the Dow rises almost 600 points in the afternoon.

If you think stock mutual fund managers were ready to grasp at straws, you have the picture.

CONCLUSION

We appear to be in the early phase of a financial earthquake that will get into the history textbooks. The volatility of the American stock market indicates something severe, yet at present is being contained. Contained by what? By rumors and hope.

I do not suggest that you entrust your financial future to people who invest in terms of rumors and hope. These are the same people who advised clients that they should hold a balanced portfolio of American stocks back in early March of 2000. That portfolio is lower today by 21% due to price inflation, and if the portfolio was the S&P 500, lower by an additional 15% because of recent market declines.

The bad news is just getting rolling.

Stay tuned.

January 26, 2008

Copyright © 2008 LewRockwell.com

Behind the falsification of US economic data

By Peter Daniels
2 June 2008In recent years, it has become increasingly clear to those who follow US economic statistics that there is something dubious about the numbers released by official government agencies and used to guide many aspects of social and public policy.The details and chronology of the corruption of economic data are presented in a new book by Kevin Phillips, the political commentator and former Republican Party adviser who has become something of a muckraking critic of the “excesses” that he helped set in motion. The book is entitled, Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American CapitalismPhillips summarizes some of his main conclusions in an article in the current issue of Harper’s Magazine. The article focuses primarily on three measures: the monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI), the quarterly Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and the monthly figure for the unemployment rate. Phillips convincingly demonstrates that the real unemployment rate in the United States is between 9 and 12 percent, not the 5 percent or less that is officially claimed. The real rate of inflation is not 2 or 3 percent, but instead, between 7 and 10 percent. And real economic growth has been about 1 percent, not the 3-4 percent officially claimed during the most recent Wall Street and housing bubble that has burst.Phillips’s background makes his statements all the more significant.He was a prime strategist for Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaignand one of the main architects of the notorious “Southern strategy,”through which the old Republican Party of Wall Streetand Main Street refashioned itself with a right-wing populist appeal,stoking racial antagonisms while above all capitalizingon the bankruptcy of American liberalismto shift the political spectrum sharply to the right.

The corruption of official statistics is not the work ofone administration, and Phillips traces it back nearly 50 years.The current occupant of the White House has, in fact,been somewhat less active on this front than his predecessors.

Soon after John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, Phillips points out,he appointed a committee to recommend possible changesin the measurement of official joblessness.What soon followed was the use of the categoryof “discouraged workers” to exclude all those who hadstopped looking for jobs because they weren’t available.Many who had lost employment in basic industry, in a trendthat was just beginning to pick up steam with automationand the rise of global competitors in such industries as steeland auto production, were no longer counted as unemployed.

During the administration of Lyndon Johnson,the federal government began using the concept of a “unified budget” that combinedSocial Security with other expenditures,thus allowing the current Social Security surplusto disguise growing budget deficits. As Phillips reports, Nixon tried to tackle the “problem” of statisticsin typically Nixonian fashion: he actually proposed that theLabor Department simply publish whichever was the lower figurebetween seasonally adjusted and unadjusted unemployment numbers.This was apparently deemed too brazen an attemptat manipulation and was never implemented. Under Nixon’s Federal Reserve chairman, Arthur Burns,however, the concept of “core inflation” was devised. This became the means of excluding certain areas like food and energy, on grounds of the “volatility” of these sectors.

The suggestion was that these prices jumped and then sometimes fell,so that it was best to remove them from the prices surveyed.In fact, food and energy together accounted for an enormous portionof spending for most sections of the working class and,as Phillips also explains, these two sectors are “now verging on another 1970s-style price surge.”As of last January, Phillips writes, the price of imported goodshad increased 13.7 percent compared with a year earlier,the biggest jump since these statistics began in 1982.Gasoline prices, meanwhile, have soared by more than 30 percent since just the beginning of this year.The Reagan administration addressed itself to the pesky problemof housing in the inflation index.An “Owner Equivalent Rent” measurement was dreamed upfor the purpose of artificially lowering the cost of housing—from a purely abstract statistical standpoint.Under Reagan, Phillips also points out, the armed forcesbegan to be included in the labor force and among the employed,thus reducing the unemployment rate, even thoughthese same members of the military would in many caseshave no employment in civilian life.

George H.W. Bush and his Council of Economic Advisersproposed the recalculation of inflation statisticsto give greater weight to the service and retail sectors and, again,reduce the official rate of inflation. This change was actually implemented during the Clintonadministration. Clinton also carried out other changes,including a reduction in the monthly household samplingfrom 60,000 to 50,000, a decrease that was concentratedin the inner cities and had the effect of reducingofficial jobless figures among African-Americans.

The Clinton years were an especially active timefor imaginative tinkering with economic data.Three other “adjustments” in the Consumer Price Indexwere implemented under the Democratic administration: product substitution, geometric weighting, and hedonic adjustment. Product substitution means that, for example,if steak gets too expensive, individuals substitute hamburger.Steak is simply removed from the typical food basketeven though it has been used in the past to track price changes.Geometric weighting is defined as lower weighting in the price indexfor those goods and services that are rising most rapidly in cost,on the assumption that they are consumed in lower quantities.This may of course be true, but the aim is to reducethe inflation figure, covering up the fact that some itemsare no longer affordable for tens of millions of people.

Phillips is particularly scathing about “hedonic adjustment,” also implemented during Clinton’s presidency.In this concept, the supposedly improved quality of some productsand services is translated into a reduction in their effective cost.This is another obvious attempt to reduce official inflation.“Reversing the theory, however, the declining quality of goodsor services should adjust effective prices and therefore add to inflation,”Phillips writes, “but that side of the equation generally goes missing.”

Phillips explains that every single one of the statistical revisionsimplemented over the past two generations have become permanent.Once initiated by a Democratic or Republican administration,they were carried over to the Bureau of Labor Statisticsand other agencies in bipartisan fashion,no matter who the current occupant of the White House was.

To all of the above should be added one other element,which Phillips does not discuss, perhaps becauseit does not stem from the economic data itself.That is the explosive growth of the US prison population,which has soared over the last 30 years and now stands at 2.3 million,compared to an overall labor force of 153.1 million.This situation, the outcome of the misnamed war on drugsand the overall bipartisan law-and-order hysteria,keeps the official unemployment rate artificially low.Between the army and the prison system,official joblessness is reduced by perhaps 2 percent.

Phillips points out that all of the changes in economic recordkeepingover the past 50 years were not the result of some grand conspiracy.They certainly did not stem from a master planhatched in the 1960s or 1970s, of course.This does not mean, however, that there is no logicto these developments, no broader economic and political source. The corruption of economic data correspondsto deepening contradictions of US and world capitalism.These contradictions impelled the bourgeoisie to abandona general policy of social reformthat had lasted for more than three decades,and to embark on what has been termeda “one-sided class war,” in which the services of the pro-capitalist trade unions were utilized to carry out an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the working population to a tiny ruling elite.

There was a step-by-step logic to all of the measuresthat were taken to misrepresent basic economic statistics.Big business could not have carried outthe policies it required without falsifying economic reality.Even though daily life became increasingly difficultfor huge sections of the working class,it was necessary to divide and disorient,to intimidate millions with the claim that “there is no alternative,”and that what Reagan referred to as the magic of the marketplacewas creating a veritable golden age from which everyone would benefit.

Some of the consequences of the falsification of datacan be translated into dollars and cents. If the CPIhad not been systematically understated, Phillips explains, Social Security checks would be 70 percent greater than they currently are. Beyond the direct impact on Social Security and other governmentexpenditures, an artificially low unemployment rate and poverty rate(officially reported as 12 percent, but in fact at least twice that figure)helped the financial and political establishmentto reduce living standards and social conditions. How many countless think tank reports and magazine articles,trumpeted by Democratic and Republican politiciansand academic figures alike, took as the gospel truththat the “Anglo-American” model of capitalism,compared to its more regulated rivals in France and Germany,meant lower unemployment? This and similar claims were based largely on lies.

American capitalism once prided itselfon the accuracy of its economic statistics.An alphabet soup of regulatory agencies carried out this work.During the decades of the Cold War, the spokesmen for big businessalways pointed to the mockery of economic data producedby the Stalinist regimes as one more proofof the superiority of the profit system. Today, however, the growing crisis is producing a historic reversal. Where American capitalism once required accurate data, today it requires lies. Phillips’s revelations share something with those of formerWhite House press secretary Scott McClellan.They are not exactly news, but they represent a kind of barometerof the growing crisis that is forcing its way into the openwithin official and semi-official circles.

-- Republican Commissioner ( of Richland County, Ohio ) David Swartz pleaded guilty to molesting two girls under the age of 11 and was sentenced to 8 years in prison.

-- Republican Speaker of the Puerto Rico House of Representatives, Edison Misla Aldarondo was sentenced to 10 years in prison for raping his daughter between the ages of 9 and 17.

-- Republican Committeeman John R. Curtain was charged with molesting a teenage boy and unlawful sexual contact with a minor.

-- Republican anti-abortion activist Howard Scott Heldreth anti-abortion activist who gained fame during the Schiavo media-circus, was convicted of two charges of raping a child in 2002 .

-- Republican anti-abortion activist Nicholas Morency pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography on his computer and offering a bounty to anybody who murders an abortion doctor.

-- Republican campaign consultant Tom Shortridge was sentenced to three years probation for taking nude photographs of a 15-year old girl.

-- Republican pastor Mike Hintz,a First Assembly of God youth pastor whom George W. Bush commended during the 2004 presidential campaign, surrendered to police after admitting to a sexual affair with a female juvenile.

-- Republican legislator Peter Dibble pleaded no contest to having an inappropriate relationship with a 13-year-old girl.

-- Republican advertising consultant Carey Lee Cramer was charged with molesting his 9-year old step-daughter after including her in an anti-Gore television commercial.

-- Republican lobbyist Craig J. Spence organized child sex parties at the White House during the 1980s.

-- Republican activist and Christian Coalition leader Beverly Russell admitted to an incestuous relationship with his step daughter, the Susan Smith who drowned her adorable two sons "in cold blood" in a South Carolina lake in 1995.

-- Republican Judge Ronald C. Kline was placed under house arrest for child molestation and possession of child pornography.

-- Republican preacher Stephen White, who demanded a return to traditional values, was sentenced to jail after offering $20 to a 14-year-old boy for permission to perform oral sex on him.

-- Republican talk show host Jon Matthews pleaded guilty to exposing his genitals to an 11 year old girl.

-- Republican anti-gay activist Earl "Butch" Kimmerling was sentenced to 40 years in prison for molesting an 8-year old girl after he attempted to stop a gay couple from adopting her.

-- Republican Party leader Paul Ingram pleaded guilty to six counts of raping his daughters and served 14 years in federal prison.

-- Republican election board official Kevin Coan was sentenced to two years probation for soliciting sex over the internet from a 14-year old girl.

-- Republican Tennessee State Representative, Keith Westmoreland was arrested on seven felony counts of lewd and lascivious exhibition to girls under the age of 16 (i.e. exposing himself to children).

-- Republican anti-abortion activist John Allen Burt was found guilty of molesting a 15-year old girl at the home for troubled girls that he ran.

-- Republican County Councilman Keola Childs pleaded guilty to molesting a male child.

-- Republican candidate Richard Gardner,a Nevada State Representative, admitted to molesting his two daughters.

-- Republican Councilman and former Marine Jack W. Gardner had been convicted of molesting a 13-year old girl. when the Republican Party, knowing of these crimes, put him on the ballot.

-- Republican County Commissioner Merrill Robert Barter pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual contact and assault on a teenage boy.

-- Republican City Councilman Fred C. Smeltzer, Jr. pleaded no contest to raping a 15 year-old girl and served 6-months in prison. Republican activist Parker J. Bena pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography on his home computer and was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison and fined $18,000.

-- Republican parole board officer and former Colorado state representative, Larry Jack Schwarz, was fired after child pornography was found in his possession. With his political career over, he went to work in the hard-core pornography industry for Platinum X Pictures, owned by his daughter, porn starlet Jewel De'Nyle (Stephany Schwarz).

-- Republican strategist and Citadel Military College graduate Robin Vanderwall, director of Faith & Family Alliance, (a Christian Coalition spin off), former student of Pat Robertson's Regent University, member of Ralph Reed's inner circle who funneled money to from lobbyist Jack Abramoff to Reed, was convicted in Virginia on five counts of soliciting sex from boys and girls over the internet.

-- Republican city councilman Mark Harris, who is described as a "good military man" and "church goer," was convicted of repeatedly having sex with an 11-year-old girl and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

-- Republican businessman Jon Grunseth withdrew his candidacy for Minnesota governor after allegations surfaced that he went swimming in the nude with four underage girls, including his daughter.

-- Republican director of the "Young Republican Federation" Nicholas Elizondo molested his 6-year old daughter and was sentenced to six years in prison.

-- Republican president of the New York City Housing Development Corp. Russell Harding pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography on his computer.

-- Republican benefactor of conservative Christian groups, Richard A. Dasen Sr., 62, who is married with grown children and several grandchildren, allegedly told police that over the past decade he paid more than $1 million to have sex with a large number of young women. He was found guilty of raping a 15-year old girl, and his sentences added up to 126 years in prison.

-- Age 62 Republican Party leader Bobby Stumbo of Denton County, Kentucky was arrested for having sex with a 5-year old boy.

-- Republican teacher and former city councilman John Collins of Asbury Park, New Jersey plead guilty to sexually molesting 13 and 14 year old girls.

-- Republican Mayor John Gosek of Oswego, New York was arrested on charges of soliciting sex from two 15-year old girls.

Did I harbor unclean thoughts as I drove past? Hell yes. Did I suppress these thoughts, ashamed lest God or offspring should glimpse them like a subscription-only cable channel through the slightly protuberant windows of my eyes? No, I did not. Why? Because they were just thoughts. I knew I would never dally with these young plaid-girt she-scholars, having no real desire to do so, nor access to a supply of GHB. The same cannot be said for conservative males. They are ravening sex fiends on a hair-trigger, doomed to act out their polluted fantasies because thought and deed are the same to them. (There's something else wrong with conservative females, a subject I will not treat here. Mainly because they don't seem to get caught as often as the males. I deal in facts, not speculation.)

I often have an urge to blacken my face with burnt cork and sing Mammy at the intersection of Wilmington and El Segundo in Compton, just to see what will happen. But I do not act on the urge. I allow the urge to come and go, just as I allow the palm trees to sway, the infinity pool to sparkle, and the polo ground to exhale dewy mist in the morning when I step out onto the balcony of the chateau. Things go on within us and without us, unbidden and unremarked-upon. To imagine one can control either one is madness. Could I cut the trees down, to make them still? Drain the pool? Pave the lawns? Yes, I could, overlooking certain zoning restrictions. But why would I? Somewhere there will be a swaying palm tree. It is inevitable that a person seeking such absolute control over the involuntary universe, whether it is inside his head or outside his French doors, will go insane. An urge is just like the swaying of a tree. It is only what it is, and harmless. An urge that is acted upon is no longer an urge. It is an action. Not harmless.

I have often posited in the past that most serious conservative males are latent homosexuals. They are tormented, according to this thesis, by knob-gobbling hobgoblins that were awakened during some fetishistic hazing ceremony back at the fraternity and have since been locked up in an inner love dungeon where they metamorphosed into demons of dingle-dandling depravity that would make even the most debased patrons of such establishments as The Manhole and the White Swallow (tragically defunct gay bars in Chicago) blench with horror. But this theory does a disservice to homosexuals. I reject the premise. Conservative males are not latent homosexuals, they are common perverts. It's the tendency towards penny loafers and Georgian Revival that got me confused.

See, a conservative is somebody threatened by the quality of being different. As in: different race, gender, income bracket, ethnicity, religion, nationality, sexual inclination, language, philosophy, educational background, lifestyle, wardrobe, age group, taste in music, drugs, or literature, different ideas, spending patterns, abilities, politics, friends, entertainments, and hairstyle. Threatened by all of those things, usually. Conservatives are xenophobic to a degree that normal people cannot imagine. To be homosexual is to be not just different, but way different; this is intolerable, and leads many otherwise useful human beings into conservativism, hence the latency. But the latter category of conservative, the sexual deviant (it seems to me based upon my extremely well-reasoned examination of the above list), is the one that causes all the trouble, and should not be conflated with the homosexual. Queers (males, anyway) are born that way, like southpaws and redheads. On the other hand, sexual deviancy (as psychologists never tire of reminding us) is not inherited, but learned.

If God is watching, why do these crackpots keep on buggering youngsters cross-eyed? Surely their bitter old God frowns on that as much as homosexuality, if not more so, and in many New England states it's also illegal. If God can tell they're thinking something off-color while driving past the Catholic school (the one that was on the shortest route to my kid's school, for example), surely He can tell they're plundering some press-ganged juvenile bottom in the cloakroom of the local ministry? I cannot say what logic supports this behavior. It is hypocrisy of the basest kind, certainly. It may be that the alpha-conservatives convince themselves it's the children's fault, for dressing up in those sexy terrycloth pyjamas with feet. Or maybe they are so drunk with power they imagine what they do isn't wrong, channeling God's authority first-hand, teaching the little naughties a valuable lesson.

Written by Chris Floyd

Friday, 18 December 2009 14:18

While we were all out doing our Christmas shopping, the highest court in the land quietly put the kibosh on a few more of the remaining shards of human liberty.

It happened earlier this week, in a discreet ruling that attracted almost no notice and took little time. In fact, our most august defenders of the Constitution did not have to exert themselves in the slightest to eviscerate not merely 220 years of Constitutional jurisprudence but also centuries of agonizing effort to lift civilization a few inches out of the blood-soaked mire that is our common human legacy. They just had to write a single sentence.

Here's how the bad deal went down. After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president's fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a "suspected enemy combatant" by the president or his designated minions is no longer a "person."  They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever -- save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials.

This extraordinary ruling occasioned none of those deep-delving "process stories" that glut the pages of the New York Times, where the minutiae of policy-making or political gaming is examined in highly-spun, microscopic detail doled out by self-interested insiders. Obviously, giving government the power to render whole classes of people "unpersons" was not an interesting subject for our media arbiters. It was news that wasn't fit to print. Likewise, the ruling provoked no thundering editorials in the Washington Post, no savvy analysis from the high commentariat -- and needless to say, no outrage whatsoever from all our fierce defenders of individual liberty on the Right.

But William Fisher noticed, and gave this report at Antiwar.com:

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal Monday to review a lower court’s dismissal of a case brought by four British former Guantanamo prisoners against former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the detainees’ lawyers charged Tuesday that the country’s highest court evidently believes that "torture and religious humiliation are permissible tools for a government to use."

...Channeling their predecessors in the George W. Bush administration, Obama Justice Department lawyers argued in this case that there is no constitutional right not to be tortured or otherwise abused in a U.S. prison abroad.

The Obama administration had asked the court not to hear the case. By agreeing, the court let stand an earlier opinion by the D.C. Circuit Court, which found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act – a statute that applies by its terms to all "persons" – did not apply to detainees at Guantanamo, effectively ruling that the detainees are not persons at all for purposes of U.S. law.

The lower court also dismissed the detainees’ claims under the Alien Tort Statute and the Geneva Conventions, finding defendants immune on the basis that "torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants."

The Constitution is clear: no person can be held without due process; no person can be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. And the U.S. law on torture of any kind is crystal clear: it is forbidden, categorically, even in time of "national emergency." And the instigation of torture is, under U.S. law, a capital crime. No person can be tortured, at any time, for any reason, and there are no immunities whatsoever for torture offered anywhere in the law.

And yet this is what Barack Obama -- who, we are told incessantly, is a super-brilliant Constitutional lawyer -- has been arguing in case after case since becoming president: Torturers are immune from prosecution; those who ordered torture are immune from prosecution. They can't even been sued for, in the specific case under review, subjecting uncharged, indefinitely detained captives to "beatings, sleep deprivation, forced nakedness, extreme hot and cold temperatures, death threats, interrogations at gunpoint, and threatened with unmuzzled dogs."

Again, let's be absolutely clear: Barack Obama has taken the freely chosen, public, formal stand -- in court -- that there is nothing wrong with any of these activities. Nothing to answer for, nothing meriting punishment or even civil penalties. What's more, in championing the lower court ruling, Barack Obama is now on record as believing -- insisting -- that torture is an ordinary, "foreseeable consequence" of military detention of all those who are arbitrarily declared "suspected enemy combatants."

And still further: Barack Obama has now declared, openly, of his own free will, that he does not consider these captives to be "persons." They are, literally, sub-humans. And what makes them sub-humans? The fact that someone in the U.S. government has declared them to be "suspected enemy combatants." (And note: even the mere suspicion of being an "enemy combatant" can strip you of your personhood.)

This is what President Barack Obama believes -- believes so strongly that he has put the full weight of the government behind a relentless series of court actions to preserve, protect and defend these arbitrary powers. (For a glimpse at just a sliver of such cases, see here and here.)

One co-counsel on the case, Shayana Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights, zeroed in on the noxious quintessence of the position taken by the Court, and by our first African-American president: its chilling resemblance to the notorious Dred Scott ruling of 1857, which upheld the principle of slavery. As Fisher notes:

"Another set of claims are dismissed because Guantanamo detainees are not ‘persons’ within the scope of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act – an argument that was too close to Dred Scott v. Sanford for one of the judges on the court of appeals to swallow," he added.

The Dred Scott case was a decision by the United States Supreme Court in 1857. It ruled that people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants — whether or not they were slaves — were not protected by the Constitution and could never be citizens of the United States.

And now, once again, 144 years after the Civil War, we have established as the law of the land and the policy of the United States government that whole classes of people can be declared "non-persons" and have their liberty stripped away -- and their torturers and tormentors protected and coddled by authority -- at a moment's notice, with no charges, no defense, no redress, on nothing more than the suspicion that they might be an "enemy combatant," according to the arbitrary definition of the state.

Barack Obama has had the audacity to declare himself the heir and embodiment of the lifework of Martin Luther King. Can this declaration of a whole new principle of universal slavery really be what King was dreaming of? Is this the vision he saw on the other side of the mountain?  Or is not the nightmarish inversion of the ideal of a better, more just, more humane world that so many have died for, in so many places, down through the centuries?

From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator - must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all

1. Invoke a Terrifying Internal and External enemy

2. Create a Gulag

3. Develop a Thug Caste

4. Set up an internal surveillance system

5. Harass citizens' groups

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release

7. Target key individuals

8. Control the press

9. Dissent equals treason

10. Suspend the rule of law

Tuesday April 24, 2007
The Guardian

Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody. They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps. As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that - each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration. Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer - learn much about our rights or our system of government - - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "Homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have. It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration - are using - time-tested tactics to Close Down an Open Society.

It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it CAN happen here. And that we are further along than we realise. Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

1. Invoke a Terrifying Internal and External enemy After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; Many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the Second World War, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; - This war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end." Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by - passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth. It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

2. Create a Gulag Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guant�namo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place. At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens - as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well. This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising. With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guant�namo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely - without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.

Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately. But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niem�ller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guant�namo set a dangerous precedent for them, too. By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.

3. Develop a Thug Caste When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating upCommunists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution. The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the admin's. endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect, privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities. Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".

4. Set up an internal surveillance system In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched. In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny. In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.

5. Harass citizens' groups The fifth thing you do is related to step 4 - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone. Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include opposition.

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders:- You are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list. In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's govt. - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens. Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list". "Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee. "I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution." "That'll do it," the man said. Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life. James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guant�namo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest. Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list. It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.

7. Target key individuals Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors. Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933. Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an admin. official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them. Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job. Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.

8. Control the press Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already. The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration. Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - - a form of retaliation that ended her career. Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators f rom organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers. Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers. You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

9. Dissent equals treason Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution. Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade. In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people".

National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors". And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly. Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guant�namo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guant�namo, is all isolation cells.) We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model, you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR. Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high- -profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.

10. Suspend the rule of law The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens. Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'." Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction. Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that. Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster." As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone. That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs". What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.

What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite. Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world. We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now. "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison.

We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry. �

Naomi Wolf's The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot will be published by Chelsea Green in September.

"All too often, we find that before we can catch these offenders, Internet service providers have unwittingly deleted the very records that would help us identify these offenders and protect future victims," Mueller said. "We must find a balance between the legitimate need for privacy and law enforcement's clear need for access."

It's not clear exactly what a data retention law would require. One proposal would go beyond Internet providers and require registrars, the companies that sell domain names, to maintain records too. And during private meetings with industry officials, FBI and Justice Department representatives have cited the desirability of also forcing search engines to keep logs--a proposal that could gain additional law enforcement support after AOL showed how useful such records could be in investigations.

Preservation vs. retention
At the moment, Internet service providers typically discard any log file that's no longer required for business reasons such as network monitoring, fraud prevention or billing disputes. Companies do, however, alter that general rule when contacted by police performing an investigation--a practice called data preservation.

CNET News.com's Anne Broache contributed to this report.

Government Power Grabs: 'Predicting' 2008

Monday , December 17, 2007

By Radley Balko

As the end of the year approaches, it's time for another column of government overreach predictions for the New Year. What outrageous, beyond-parody grabs at power and erosions of civil liberties will transpire in 2008? My predictions:

— The Bush administration will claim it has the power to kidnap citizens of foreign countries for violating U.S. law, and extradite them to the U.S. for trial and imprisonment—even for white collar crimes unrelated to terrorism, and even for acts that aren't illegal in the countries where the target is a citizen.

— Police will take enforcement of prostitution laws to a new level, by arresting and seizing the cars of anyone who merely talks to an undercover cop posing as a sex worker. Good samaratans, beware.

— The war on prescription painkillers will also reach new absurdities, as people will begin to be arrested and convicted of possessing painkillers for which they have a prescription . Prosecutors will weirdly argue that there is no "prescription defense" to possessing prescribed medication.

— How about sex crimes laws? I predict that here too, prosecutors will overreach. Watch, as some overzealous district attorney will charge middle school kids with sex crimes for such childhood shenanigans as slapping fellow classmates on the buttocks.

— While it continues to federalize crime and find new reasons to toss people in prison, members of Congress will simultaneously continue to attempt to put themselves above the law. I predict that the House of Representatives will attempt to prevent police from searching the computers of one of its members, even if that member is being investigated for soliciting sex with minors.

— Public schools will teach not just reading, writing, and arithmetic, they'll start teaching students to spy on their parents , and to report their parents to local authorities for minor violations of city codes, such as failing to recycle, or failing to keep their lawn trimmed.

— Pressed for revenue, at least one state in the country will pass draconian new traffic laws mandating fines of $1,000 or more for routine traffic violations, in a bald attempt to fill state treasury coffers. The bill will be sponsored by a lawmaker who, conveniently enough, also has a law practice that specializes in defending people accused of traffic violations. He will not disclose during the debate that the bill will almost certainly benefit him financially. He'll be reelected, anyway.

— A state governor will propose legislation calling for two-year prison terms for people who play online poker . Rather shamelessly, the proposal will come in the same bill that calls for allowing the construction of three new casinos in the same state.

— While we're talking about gambling, states will continue to crack down on the poker craze. Even VFW posts won't be immune. Soon, we'll see cops sent to break up $5 cribbage games, and SWAT teams to break up charity poker games. In fact, cops will raid bars where it merely looks like people are gambling, even if no gambling is actually taking place. Meanwhile, states will continue to spend millions promoting their own lotteries.

— Standing on the sidewalk will become a crime .

— Cities will begin seizing the cars of people who play their stereos too loud . In fact, they'll seize the cars based on the word of someone else that the car's owner was playing his stereo too loud.

— Proving there's no part of your life the Nanny State can't reach, states will begin asking bars to install talking urinal cakes , which will warn men as they relieve themselves that drinking and driving isn't cool.

— Another state's lawmakers will propose a bill that bans "eating, drinking, smoking, reading, writing, personal grooming, playing an instrument, interacting with pets or cargo, talking on a cell phone or using any other personal communication device" while driving.

— Two years after banning traffic cameras in the name of "liberty," the Virginia legislature will decide that revenue is more important than liberty, and will revoke the ban .

—The FBI will imply to Congress that sometimes it has to let it's undercover informants get away with murdering American citizens so as not to disrupt drug investigations.

— Following up on the enormous "success" (that's sarcasm) of laws putting cold medicine behind the drug store counters because they can be used to make meth, legislators will propose putting baking soda behind the counter , too, because it can be used to make crack.

Too over-the top? Too paranoid? As you may have guessed from clicking the embedded links (of if you read either of my two prior year-end columns ), none of the bullet points above were actual predictions. Each of the above already happened in the past 12 months, in 2007.

Each year, government at all levels encroaches a bit more on our personal, economic, and political freedom. Here's one prediction that I'm pretty confident will come true: Come December 2008, there will be more than enough material for another column like this one.

Radley Balko is a senior editor with Reason magazine. He publishes the weblog, TheAgitator.com.

By NWV News writer Jim Kouri
Posted 1:00 AM Eastern
February 23, 2009
© NewsWithViews.com

While the mainstream news media are hyping President Barack Obama's election and the dismal economic downturn in the United States, more and more states are declaring -- or have already declared -- sovereignty.

According to political experts such as strategist Mike Baker, Americans are becoming disenchanted with the federal government's lack of perspective on issues of great concern -- illegal aliens, crime, economic turmoil -- while intruding into the private lives of citizens with gun-control laws and other intrusions.

"Many [citizens] are angry at federal government intrusion into their lives and into matters that were intended by our Founding Fathers to be relegated to the individual states," said Baker.

"Take, for instance, the police power. Since the beginning of our republic, police and law enforcement was considered a function of each state in the union. Now we have federal law enforcement agencies who are taking away police powers from states. Why does an agency created to oversee issues related to alcohol, tobacco and firearms need to have SWAT teams?" asks the conservative political strategist.

"I believe that because the federal government refuses to perform their duty of protecting US sovereignty that more and more state legislatures find it necessary to protect their own individual sovereignty. The feds are careful not to mistreat illegal alien criminals, for example, but they see no problem with wiping out an entire compound of American citizens as happened in [the Branch Davidian compound] Waco, Texas," warns former NYPD detective Sidney Frances.

"Look at California: they are preparing to release almost 50,000 convicts because of overcrowding. Why isn't the federal government providing funds to keep those criminals locked up? Instead, they provide billions of dollars for abortions overseas," he added.

Not only does the US Constitution provide for the sovereignty, the US Supreme Court also ruled in New York v. United States, 112 S. Ct. 2408 (1992), that Congress may not simply commandeer the legislative and regulatory processes of the states.

So far, according to documents obtained by NewswithViews.com, nine states have declared soverignty with another 13 states considering legislation to do so. Some legislation addresses all aspects of states’ rights, while other legislation addresses certain actions such as abortion control and gun owners’ rights.

Washington State Declaring Total Sovereignty

In the state of Washington, house and senate bill HJM-4009 declares:

"The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States specifically provides that, [T]he powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people; and the Tenth Amendment defines the total scope of federal power as being those powers specifically granted to it by the Constitution of the United States and no more; and... [F]ederalism is the constitutional division of powers between the national and state governments and is widely regarded as one of America's most valuable contributions to political science...."

HJM-4009 goes on to state: "Many federal mandates are directly in violation of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States; and WHEREAS, The United States Supreme Court has ruled in New York v. United States, 112 S. Ct. 2408 (1992), that Congress may not simply commandeer the legislative and regulatory processes of the states; and WHEREAS, A number of proposals from previous administrations and some now being considered by the present administration and from Congress may further violate the Constitution of the United States...."

And here's the resolution: "NOW, THEREFORE, Your Memorialists respectfully resolve:
(1) That the State of Washington hereby claims sovereignty under HJM 4009 p. 2 the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States over all powers not otherwise enumerated and granted to the federal government by the Constitution of the United States; and
(2) That this serve as a Notice and Demand to the federal government to maintain the balance of powers where the Constitution of the United States established it and to cease and desist, effective immediately, any and all mandates that are beyond the scope of its constitutionally delegated powers."

"BE IT RESOLVED, That copies of this Memorial be immediately transmitted to the Honorable Barack Obama, President of the United States, the President of the United States Senate, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives of each state's legislature of the United States of America, and each member of Congress from the State of Washington."

"In other words, the state of Washington is telling Washington, DC and the other 49 states that the federal government should take a walk and not interfere in matters of that state," quips Mike Baker.

New Hampshire Tells Feds to Get Lost?

It's not only western and southern states that are seeking sovereignty. For example, in the northeast, long considered a bastion of liberal politics, New Hampshire has joined the fray. HCR-6 is a resolution "affirming States’ rights based on Jeffersonian principles."

The bill states: "[T]he Constitution of the State of New Hampshire... declares that the people of this State have the sole and exclusive right of governing themselves as a free, sovereign, and independent State; and do, and forever hereafter shall, exercise and enjoy every power, jurisdiction, and right, pertaining thereto, which is not, or may not hereafter be, by them expressly delegated to the United States of America in congress assembled; and... the Constitution of the State... declares that the people inhabiting the territory formerly called the province of New Hampshire, do hereby solemnly and mutually agree with each other, to form themselves into a free, sovereign and independent body-politic, or State, by the name of The State of New Hampshire...."

HCR specifically addresses the police power in the resolution: "[T]he Constitution of the United States, having delegated to Congress a power to punish treason, counterfeiting the securities and current coin of the United States, piracies, and felonies committed on the high seas, and offences (sic) against the law of nations, slavery, and no other crimes whatsoever; and it being true as a general principle, and one of the amendments to the Constitution having also declared, that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people...”

[T]herefore all acts of Congress which assume to create, define, or punish crimes, other than those so enumerated in the Constitution are altogether void, and of no force; and that the power to create, define, and punish such other crimes is reserved, and, of right, appertains solely and exclusively to the respective States, each within its own territory."

The bill goes much further than the one in Washington state in that it stipulates the nullification of certain federal acts:

"[N]ullifications include, but are not limited to:

"I. Establishing martial law or a state of emergency within one of the States comprising the United States of America without the consent of the legislature of that State.

"II. Requiring involuntary servitude, or governmental service other than a draft during a declared war, or pursuant to, or as an alternative to, incarceration after due process of law.

"III. Requiring involuntary servitude or governmental service of persons under the age of 18 other than pursuant to, or as an alternative to, incarceration after due process of law.

"IV. Surrendering any power delegated or not delegated to any corporation or foreign government.

"V. Any act regarding religion; further limitations on freedom of political speech; or further limitations on freedom of the press.

"VI. Further infringements on the right to keep and bear arms including prohibitions of type or quantity of arms or ammunition... (emphasis added).

HCR-6 end this controversial statement:

"Should any such act of Congress become law or Executive Order or Judicial Order be put into force, all powers previously delegated to the United States of America by the Constitution for the United States shall revert to the several States individually. Any future government of the United States of America shall require ratification of three quarters of the States seeking to form a government of the United States of America and shall not be binding upon any State not seeking to form such a government."

"What this bill is saying is that except for certain national interests, New Hampshire shall independently deal with many of the problems that arise. They wish to be free of federal government intrusion," explains Baker.

Missouri's Declaration of Sovereignty Regarding Abortion

Missouri's bill is more narrowly worded to address federal government interference in how that state regulates abortion.

Quite simply, HR-212 "declares Missouri's sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment and urges the United States Congress to reject the passage of the federal Freedom of Choice Act which prohibits regulations on abortion" within that state.

Move to Limit Government in Oklahoma

"With a Republican-controlled Legislature set to convene next month for the first time in state history, chances are good the [sovereignty] measure will pass," Rep. Charles Key told the local news media

Key, a Republican from Oklahoma City believes that "many federal laws violate the 10th Amendment of the US Constitution, which states the powers not delegated to the federal government "are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” The Constitution lists about 20 duties required of the federal government.

"We, the people in the states, created the federal government,” Key said. "They act like they created us and we’re under their authority, and that’s really not the case.”

According to a news sources in Oklahoma, Key’s resolution states the federal government should "cease and desist, effective immediately, mandates that are beyond the scope of these constitutionally delegated powers.”

"It’s to help try to get us back to following the Constitution and try to preserve our constitutional form of government,” Key told reporters.

"The federal government continues to violate it more and more. It’s gotten so bad that they pretty much do whatever they want and get away with just about anything they want to get away with,” he said.

According to news reports, the resolution, House Joint Resolution 1003, is similar to a resolution Key filed last year.

It sailed through the Republican-controlled state House, passing 92-3, but was not taken up in the evenly split Senate. Republicans picked up two Senate seats in November’s election to have a 26-22 majority.

Key said there’s a "much better” chance that the resolution will pass the Senate this year, but he said he and others "will have to work hard to get it heard over there.”

Georgia’s Sovereignty

Arguably, Georgia’s bill -- SR-308 – is the most comprehensive declaration of that state’s sovereignty, and it leaves little doubt that it’s citizens are serious about preventing federal intrusion in the state’s affairs as well an individual citizens’ lives.

Highlights of the resolution include:

“NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE SENATE that the State of Georgia hereby claims sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States over all powers not otherwise enumerated and granted to the federal government by the United States Constitution and that this measure shall serve as notice and demand to the federal government, as our agent, to cease and desist, effective immediately, mandates that are beyond the scope of its constitutionally delegated powers.

“BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Secretary of the Senate is authorized and directed to transmit copies of this resolution to the President of the United States, the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, the President of the United States Senate, each member of Georgia's congressional delegation, and the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate of each state legislature in the United States of America.”

Montana's Resolution

Montana's HB-246 is being applauded by gun owners across the nation. It specifically rejects the federal government's intrusion on how Montana controls -- or doesn't control -- firearms owner by private citizens.

The bill's preamble states that HB-246 is: "An act exempting [Montana] from federal regulation under the commerce clause of [the US Constitution] a firearm, a firearm accessory, or ammunition manufactured and retained in Montana."

In another section of the bill, the proposed law stipulates: "A personal firearm, a firearm accessory, or ammunition that is manufactured commercially or privately in Montana and that remains within the borders of Montana is not subject to federal law or federal regulation, including registration, under the authority of congress to regulate interstate commerce."

The law would prevent federal agencies such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms from entering Montana and confiscating weapons legally sold in that state.

And just in case a Washington, DC bureaucrat decides to circumvent this Montana gun owners' sovereignty, the law states: "Firearms accessories that are imported into Montana from another state and that are subject to federal regulation as being in interstate commerce do not subject a firearm to federal regulation under interstate commerce because they are attached to or used in conjunction with a firearm in Montana."

"Needless to say, the National Rifle Association and other gun-rights groups are applauding this legislation," said former NYPD detective Frances.

"It's hoped more states will wake up and pass such legislation," he added.

On average, world trade fell 31 percent in January 2009. To varying degrees, recession and depression gripped globally.

“The outlook for global consumption remains bleak. Exports are likely to remain lackluster until global consumers regain their appetite for consumption,” wrote Jing Ulrich, managing director at JPMorgan in Hong Kong, in response to the dire data.

To track and make practical use of trends requires critical analysis of not only the data but also of the interpretations arising from the data. This becomes particularly essential when interpretations express a virtual media consensus. “Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect,” advised Mark Twain.

A case in point: On the surface, Ms. Ulrich’s assessment above does not seem unreasonable. It is a theme expressed, with minor variations, by a majority of economic analysts reported by the media. But that assessment rests upon a set of false or questionable assumptions.

The first assumption was that all consumers need to do is “regain their appetites” for exports. But it has nothing to do with “appetites.” Consumers were broke. They were no less hungry for products – they just didn’t have the money to buy them.

The second assumption was that once consumers started consuming again exports would regain luster. Implicit in this statement was that as exports grew, economies would rebound and everything would go back to normal. This “normal” refrain was endlessly repeated, not only by economic analysts, but by politicians and business leaders.

Unquestioned was not only the inevitability, but also the virtue and desirability of a return to “normal.” What was normal?

Normal, prior to “The Greatest Depression,” meant unchecked over consumption and over development made possible by the availability of cheap money and easy credit.

On the consumer end, “normal” was a death wish, “shop ‘til you drop” – an obsessive compulsion by the profligate many to spend money they didn’t have but had to borrow. The spending spree extended to buying expensive new cars rather than affordable used ones. It had people building extensions and making home improvements when neither were necessary. It meant buying a McMansion when a Cape Cod would do. Splurging on expensive vacations, elaborate weddings and extravagant bar-mitzvahs to impress family and friends.

Borrowed money financed a major lifestyle upgrade that otherwise could not have ever been imagined, but that corresponded to what most people considered the “American Dream.” Borrow to the limit now, and pay sooner or later was “normal.”

On the commercial/financial end, “normal” was also the obsessive compulsion to endlessly acquire, not merely upgrade. Borrowed billions, lots of leverage and little collateral provided financiers and developers with the power to acquire ever more money, assets and prestige – through mergers and acquisitions, building developments, equity market speculation and predatory business practices that gobbled up or drove out the competition.

Give or take a bit of regulation and self-restraint, this was the “normal” the popular new President promised to return to.

Which brings us to the third assumption, and arguably the most important which was that the crisis – inability of banks to lend and businesses to borrow – was mainly responsible for the economic disaster. As President Obama put it, “Our goal is to quicken the day when we restart lending to the American people and American business, and end this crisis once and for all.”

He said, “You see, the flow of credit is the lifeblood of our economy. The ability to get a loan is how you finance the purchase of everything from a home to a car to a college education; how stores stock their shelves, farms buy equipment, and businesses make payroll.”

Sounds positive, doesn’t it? Ease the “flow of credit.” Make it easier “to get a loan.”

But what the President meant and did not say was … take on more debt, borrow more money.

Sound familiar? Turn back the clock. Remember the advertisements at the start of the decade encouraging Americans to take out home equity loans, to buy new cars, to move up from a starter home into the dream house? With interest rates at 46 year lows and credit flowing, the public were suckered into betting on their futures with borrowed money they could only pay back as long as they had jobs, could make payments and the economy didn’t collapse.

But when they lost their jobs, they couldn’t make payments and the economy began to collapse. Total unemployment (including discouraged workers and those with part time jobs looking for full time) was nearing 15 percent. In the fourth quarter of 2008, the net worth of American households fell by the largest amount in more than a half-century of record keeping. By February 2009, the foreclosure rate was up 30 percent from February 2008.

What Mr. Obama promised as the solution was, and had been, the problem. The country was already overwhelmed with debt … debt that it couldn’t pay back. In what way could incurring more debt “end this crisis once and for all”?

It was a plain fact; the flow of easy credit produced a torrent of debt. In 2009, private sector credit market debt was 174 percent of GDP. Household debt-service ratio was at an all-time high. US households had 39 percent more debt than income. (In 1962, consumers had 37 percent less debt than income. To promote policies encouraging people to take out more loans and sink still deeper into debt was abnormal, not “normal.” The abnormal had been renamed the normal.

Instead of encouraging people to live within their means, cut back, save money, and distinguish between “wants” and real needs, the official policy was to turn on the credit tap and flood the world with more debt.

The sanity of the policy was never in question. Arguments raged only over the quickest and most effective way to turn on the money spigot.

Everyone was looking for someone, somewhere, for rescue, and most eyes were turned to the United States. Even though the US was blamed for the flagrant economic abuses that brought on the crisis, given its economic clout and Superpower status, America was still looked to for the leadership needed to pave the way to recovery.

With its globally popular new president, hopes ran high that American know-how would know how to fix the problem … as though it were an intellectual exercise that could be solved by applying the correct economic formula.

No such formula existed. Yet so desperate was the world that it placed its hopes on the very people responsible for the deregulation of the financial industry largely blamed for the crisis. The deregulators now occupied key positions within the cabinet of that globally popular new President.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett added a military dimension, dubbing the meltdown an “economic Pearl Harbor.” Buffett called on Congress to unite behind President Barack Obama, comparing the economic crisis to a military conflict that needed a commander-in-chief. “Patriotic Americans will realize this is a war,” he said.

If it was an economic Pearl Harbor, the enemies were Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, A.I.G., Countrywide, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Bear Stearns, and all the other banks, brokerages, speculators, insurance companies, hedge funds and leverage buyout specialists that had launched the sneak attack on the American economy.

It had nothing to do with patriotism, unless being a “Patriotic American” meant appeasing and rewarding the enemy with trillions of dollars of taxpayer money and not being allowed to know where the money went.

Fed Refuses to Release Bank Data,
Insists on Secrecy

March 5, 2009 (Bloomberg) – The Federal Reserve Board of Governors receives daily reports on bailout loans to financial institutions and won’t make the information public, the central bank said in a reply in a Bloomberg News lawsuit.

The Fed refused yesterday to disclose the names of the borrowers and the loans, alleging that it would cast “a stigma on recipients of more than $1.9 trillion of emergency credit from US taxpayers and the assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.

The public had been cozened into believing:

• That disclosing the identities of the recipients would poorly reflect upon their public image and therefore their ability to function. Secrecy, on the other hand, allowed them to continue making disastrous decisions, while bamboozling clients who would not know they were dealing with incompetents – who stayed in business only because of huge taxpayer-financed infusions of corporate welfare.

• The “too big to fail” had to be bailed out by taxpayers in order to keep “the credit markets from seizing up.” But the consequences of seized up credit were rarely if ever spelled out.

Many financial analysts no less “expert” than those pushing through the bailouts were convinced that allowing the credit markets to seize up would, in the long run, prove far less costly than endlessly printing money and pouring it down a plush-lined sink hole. Buffett was wrong. It wasn’t a “war” at all. It was a criminal case, or should have been, but the accused took a financial Fifth Amendment – the right to remain silent, since any statement made could be used as evidence against them – and got away with it.

When, at a hearing before the Senate Budget Committee, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke was asked, “Will you tell the American people to whom you lent $2.2 trillion of their dollars?” He answered, “No.”

Regards,

Gerald Celente

The State of Montana has defied the federal government and their gun laws. This will prompt a showdown between the federal government and the State of Montana. The federal government fears citizens owning guns. They try to curtail what types of guns they can own. The gun control laws all have one common goal – confiscation of privately owned firearms.

Montana has gone beyond drawing a line in the sand. They have challenged the Federal Government. The fed now either takes them on and risks them saying the federal agents have no right to violate their state gun laws and arrest the federal agents that try to enforce the federal firearms acts. This will be a world-class event to watch. Montana could go to voting for secession from the union, which is really throwing the gauntlet in Obamas face. If the federal government does nothing they lose face. Gotta love it.

Important Points – If guns and ammunition are manufactured inside the State of Montana for sale and use inside that state then the federal firearms laws have no applicability since the federal government only has the power to control commerce across state lines. Montana has the law on their side. Since when did the USA start following their own laws especially the constitution of the USA, the very document that empowers the USA.

Silencers made in Montana and sold in Montana would be fully legal and not registered. As a note silencers were first used before the 007 movies as a device to enable one to hunt without disturbing neighbors and scaring game. They were also useful as devices to control noise when practicing so as to not disturb the neighbors.

Silencers work best with a bolt-action rifle. There is a long barrel and the chamber is closed tight so as to direct all the gases though the silencer at the tip of the barrel. Semi-auto pistols and revolvers do not really muffle the sound very well except on the silver screen. The revolvers bleed gas out with the sound all over the place. The semi-auto pistols bleed the gases out when the slide recoils back.

Silencers are maybe nice for snipers picking off enemy soldiers even though they reduce velocity but not very practical for hit men shooting pistols in crowded places. Silencers were useful tools for gun enthusiasts and hunters.

There would be no firearm registration, serial numbers, criminal records check, waiting periods or paperwork required. So in a short period of time there would be millions and millions of unregistered untraceable guns in Montana. Way to go Montana.

Discussion – Let us see what Obama does. If he hits Montana hard they will probably vote to secede from the USA. The governor of Texas has already been refusing Federal money because he does not want to agree to the conditions that go with it and he has been saying secession is a right they have as sort of a threat. Things are no longer the same with the USA. Do not be deceived by Obama acting as if all is the same, it is not.

Text of the New Law

HOUSE BILL NO. 246
INTRODUCED BY J. BONIEK, BENNETT, BUTCHER, CURTISS, RANDALL, WARBURTON
AN ACT EXEMPTING FROM FEDERAL REGULATION UNDER THE COMMERCE CLAUSE OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES A FIREARM, A FIREARM ACCESSORY, OR AMMUNITION MANUFACTURED AND RETAINED IN MONTANA; AND PROVIDING AN APPLICABILITY DATE.
BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF MONTANA:

Section 1. Short title. [Sections 1 through 6] may be cited as the "Montana Firearms Freedom Act".

Section 2. Legislative declarations of authority. The legislature declares that the authority for [sections 1 through 6] is the following:
(1) The 10th amendment to the United States constitution guarantees to the states and their people all powers not granted to the federal government elsewhere in the constitution and reserves to the state and people of Montana certain powers as they were understood at the time that Montana was admitted to statehood in 1889. The guaranty of those powers is a matter of contract between the state and people of Montana and the United States as of the time that the compact with the United States was agreed upon and adopted by Montana and the United States in 1889.
(2) The ninth amendment to the United States constitution guarantees to the people rights not granted in the constitution and reserves to the people of Montana certain rights, as they were understood at the time that Montana was admitted to statehood in 1889. The guaranty of those rights is a matter of contract between the state and people of Montana and the United States as of the time that the compact with the United States was agreed upon and adopted by Montana and the United States in 1889.
(3) The regulation of intrastate commerce is vested in the states under the 9th and 10th amendments to the United States constitution, particularly if not expressly preempted by federal law. Congress has not expressly preempted state regulation of intrastate commerce pertaining to the manufacture on an intrastate basis of firearms, firearms accessories, and ammunition.
(4) The second amendment to the United States constitution reserves to the people the right to keep and bear arms as that right was understood at the time that Montana was admitted to statehood in 1889, and the guaranty of the right is a matter of contract between the state and people of Montana and the United States as of the time that the compact with the United States was agreed upon and adopted by Montana and the United States in 1889.(5) Article II, section 12, of the Montana constitution clearly secures to Montana citizens, and prohibits government interference with, the right of individual Montana citizens to keep and bear arms. This constitutional protection is unchanged from the 1889 Montana constitution, which was approved by congress and the people of Montana, and the right exists, as it was understood at the time that the compact with the United States was agreed upon and adopted by Montana and the United States in 1889.

Section 3. Definitions. As used in [sections 1 through 6], the following definitions apply:
(1) "Borders of Montana" means the boundaries of Montana described in Article I, section 1, of the 1889 Montana constitution.
(2) "Firearms accessories" means items that are used in conjunction with or mounted upon a firearm but are not essential to the basic function of a firearm, including but not limited to telescopic or laser sights, magazines, flash or sound suppressors, folding or aftermarket stocks and grips, speedloaders, ammunition carriers, and lights for target illumination.
(3) "Generic and insignificant parts" includes but is not limited to springs, screws, nuts, and pins.
(4) "Manufactured" means that a firearm, a firearm accessory, or ammunition has been created from basic materials for functional usefulness, including but not limited to forging, casting, machining, or other processes for working materials.

Section 4. Prohibitions. A personal firearm, a firearm accessory, or ammunition that is manufactured commercially or privately in Montana and that remains within the borders of Montana is not subject to federal law or federal regulation, including registration, under the authority of congress to regulate interstate commerce. It is declared by the legislature that those items have not traveled in interstate commerce. This section applies to a firearm, a firearm accessory, or ammunition that is manufactured in Montana from basic materials and that can be manufactured without the inclusion of any significant parts imported from another state. Generic and insignificant parts that have other manufacturing or consumer product applications are not firearms, firearms accessories, or ammunition, and their importation into Montana and incorporation into a firearm, a firearm accessory, or ammunition manufactured in Montana does not subject the firearm, firearm accessory, or ammunition to federal regulation. It is declared by the legislature that basic materials, such as unmachined steel and unshaped wood, are not firearms, firearms accessories, or ammunition and are not subject to congressional authority to regulate firearms, firearms accessories, and ammunition under interstate commerce as if they were actually firearms, firearms accessories, or ammunition. The authority of congress to regulate interstate commerce in basic materials does not include authority to regulate firearms, firearms accessories, and ammunition made in Montana from those materials. Firearms accessories that are imported into Montana from another state and that are subject to federal regulation as being in interstate commerce do not subject a firearm to federal regulation under interstate commerce because they are attached to or used in conjunction with a firearm in Montana.

Section 5. Exceptions. [Section 4] does not apply to:
(1) A firearm that cannot be carried and used by one person;
(2) A firearm that has a bore diameter greater than 1 1/2 inches and that uses smokeless powder, not black powder, as a propellant;
(3) ammunition with a projectile that explodes using an explosion of chemical energy after the projectile leaves the firearm; or
(4) a firearm that discharges two or more projectiles with one activation of the trigger or other firing device.

Section 6. Marketing of firearms. A firearm manufactured or sold in Montana under [sections 1 through 6] must have the words "Made in Montana" clearly stamped on a central metallic part, such as the receiver or frame.

Section 7. Codification instruction. [Sections 1 through 6] are intended to be codified as an integral part of Title 30, and the provisions of Title 30 apply to [sections 1 through 6].

Section 8. Applicability. [This act] applies to firearms, firearms accessories, and ammunition that are manufactured, as defined in [section 3], and retained in Montana after October 1, 2009.

 
Ernest Hancock 
Website: www.ernesthancock.com
Date: 05-03-2009
Subject: Gun Rights

By Cliff Kincaid
February 24, 2009
NewsWithViews.Com

The truth is starting to seep out. Because of the need for more money to
finance the latest bailout—the Obama economic stimulus plan—America is going
further in debt to the Chinese Communists. Our country is officially being
sold to the highest bidder. And we have striking confirmation of this fact
from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The good news is that a correspondent for the mainstream media—Wyatt Andrews
of CBS News—has figured this out and has managed to get on the air with his
terrifying findings. Andrews’ report on the Friday CBS Evening News with
Katie Couric was direct and to the point. Clinton is in China to beg for a
handout.
“The truth is the Administration needs China’s help. America’s stimulus is
very expensive and the U.S. Wants China to help finance it,” Andrews
reported. This is what America has become—a country that sends its Secretary
of State abroad to beg for money from foreigners. In this case, it’s a
communist dictatorship that forces women to have abortions, tortures
Christians, and threatens the freedom and democratic government of Taiwan.
So the cost of the “stimulus” is more sacrifice of American independence and
sovereignty, as well as our own values, ideals, and commitment to human
freedom. It is a sad day both for America and China.
Clinton was shown saying, “We are relying on the Chinese government to
continue to buy our debt.” The almighty dollar takes precedence over
everything else, even as it falls in value and the dangers of hyperinflation
and national bankruptcy loom. The tragedy is compounded by the fact that
pandering to the Chinese will not solve anything. This policy, set in motion
by big banks and corporations and pursued by Democratic and Republican
Administrations, is what got us into this predicament in the first place.
Clinton’s comments, which concern the overall economic policy of the new
administration, are far more significant than the Obama mortgage plan.
Clinton is getting to the heart of the issue—how the mortgage plan and the
stimulus are being financed.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs expressed irritation last week that CNBC
commentator Rick Santelli went into a rant over the prospect of forcing
American taxpayers to underwrite the bad mortgages of deadbeats and others
who are unable to pay their mortgages. But Santelli only touched on one
small part of the problem.
Where’s the outrage over the pro-China policy that spans several
administrations, and which has benefited his corporate bosses at General
Electric, of permitting the communist dictatorship in Beijing to have the
upper hand in global trade relations? All that Santelli has to do to
understand this problem is attend a GE annual meeting and listen to the
complaints of the GE workers losing their jobs to China. But don’t expect to
see anything about that on CNBC, NBC, or MSNBC.
If you want more information on this travesty, please go to the website www
screwthatbulb.org and learn how GE is going “green” which has the effect of
shipping American jobs to China. If Santelli did a rant about that, you can
bet he wouldn’t be on the air again.
We were already in terrible shape under the Bush Administration because of a
mysterious financial collapse apparently caused by illegal manipulation of
our markets, but now the communists have us completely over a barrel because
the Obama Administration, with the acquiescence of Congress, recklessly
decided to spend even more money that we don’t have. Under the circumstances
this is criminal negligence.
Mrs. Clinton is officially stating what everyone should know is the truth.
She deserves credit for being brutally honest. America has become a
subsidiary of China Inc. In order for the U.S. To stay afloat, we have to
depend on Beijing to finance a bailout. But the other major problem, of
course, is that the stimulus is not a bailout in any real sense of the word.
It depends on more government debt and borrowing at a huge cost of being
more indebted to the Chinese. So the bailout is really digging our nation’s
grave deeper.
To make matters even worse, as the Andrews report made clear, the cost will
include the jobs that the Obama Administration says will be created by the
stimulus. He interviewed an American manufacturer about the loss of American
jobs caused by China’s trade practices, who said that the “cheating” in
global trade has cost millions of American manufacturing jobs.
In the end, the only “jobs” that will be created or “saved,” as Obama likes
to say, will likely be those benefiting from spending the federal money that
the federal government doesn’t have. Most of them work for government at all
levels.
Productive private sector manufacturing jobs will not be created—and cannot
be—because despite their campaign promises, neither Obama nor Hillary will
do anything about those unfair Chinese trade practices, such as the currency
manipulation, that make Chinese goods artificially cheap and American goods
more expensive.
The Andrews report, which caught me completely by surprise on a newscast
that tends to portray the new Administration in completely flattering tones,
was absolutely blistering in contrasting what Obama and Clinton had said
during the campaign and what they are doing now.
“Both the man who became the President and his future Secretary of State
told the voters they would make the [trade] cheating go away,” Andrews
reported. He showed candidate Obama saying that he would do everything in
his power to stop China from manipulating its currency and Hillary saying
that she would “aggressively crack down on China’s unfair trade practices.”
These claims were shown to be empty and abandoned campaign promises. We
should have assumed that would be the case.
Andrews asked Secretary of State Clinton about this and “she explained that
times have changed.” Clinton said, “That was at a different time when we
weren’t facing the kind of difficult situations we face today.” Translation:
we need their money and we are in no position to demand or criticize
anything. These Clinton comments preceded Andrews’ remarks about the cost of
the stimulus and the perceived need to get China to help finance it.
As we had noted in a previous column about the Administration’s so-called
economic program, Clinton was going to China for the purpose of getting
Chinese money to finance the stimulus. Now we have it all on the record. Her
trip was designed to reinforce Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s private
conversations on this topic with Chinese officials.
The land of the free and the home of the brave has now become the land of
the quivering milquetoast, in awe of an emerging Communist giant that our
big banks and corporations, as well as our government, have built into an
economic superpower.
President Obama apparently sees nothing wrong with this. Indeed, during the
campaign he praised China’s staging of the Olympic Games, saying their
infrastructure was impressive and was something the U.S. might consider
emulating.
Now, with Hillary Clinton having signaled to the Chinese dictators that we
will beg for their money and ignore unfair trade practices and even human
rights violations, it will be left up to President Obama to seal the deal.
When he gives his State of the Union-like speech to Congress and the
American people on Tuesday night, he will in reality be auditioning for a
front-row seat on the board of directors of China Inc. Don’t expect to hear
anything critical of the butchers in Beijing.
© 2009 Cliff Kincaid - All Rights Reserved

Under Bush, immigrant communities lived in a constant state of fear — terrorized by “Homeland Security” agents arresting anyone who appeared Latino and lacked ID. Families were separated, children left parentless, property abandoned, and long-lasting relationships severed.

This scenario — highly reminiscent of the NAZI Gestapo — has changed only slightly under Obama. Some say for the worst. Obama’s campaign promise of undoing Bush’s immigration strategy was, like nearly every other promise he’s made, a blatant lie. Instead, he’s adopted the “enforcement first” immigration approach -- the style of John McCain that Obama once mocked.

The Obama Administration is taking immigration policies created under Bush and expanding them, much like he’s done with Bush’s war policies, bank bailouts, civil right restrictions (the Patriot Act, torture, unlimited/unchallengeable imprisonment, etc.).

Obama’s head of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, admits: “We are expanding enforcement, but I think in the right way.” In this case the “right way” is Bush’s way, though modified for public consumption.

While ending the large, media-attracting factory raids that Bush endorsed, Obama is intensifying “…a shift in federal law enforcement that began under George W. Bush and now has taken a particularly callous turn under President Obama.” (Los Angles Times, Oct 3, 2009).
The Los Angles Times refers specifically to the recent firing of 1,800 mostly immigrant workers in Los Angeles, who suffered the same fate as thousands of others around the country victimized by the Obama administration.

Companies that are suspected of hiring immigrants are targeted and closely monitored, “…but instead of concluding with a raid, Immigration and Customs Enforcement simply compels the employers to fire anybody whose papers aren't in order under pain of ruinous civil penalties.” The Los Angles Times concluded, “…the most appalling aspect of the Obama administration's wretched conduct of this affair is its studied indifference to the fate of the men and women it has thrown out of work.”

Well said.

When immigrants are fired from their jobs, they receive no unemployment insurance. Thus, the heavy burden of being jobless during a severe recession is multiplied, and families who’ve lived in the U.S. for years suffer terribly. Obama’s merciless attitude to immigrants was displayed nationally when he proudly declared that, under his health care plan, “illegal immigrants will not qualify.” When asked later about the health care of immigrant children, Obama seemed to show a moment of compassion. Exceptions may be granted, he said, "partly because if you've got children who may be here illegally but are still in playgrounds or at schools, and potentially are passing on illnesses and communicable diseases, that aren't getting vaccinated, that I think is a situation where you may have to make an exception." The President is astonishingly clear: caring for the basic well-being of immigrants or their children is of zero concern.

This coldness is reflected in all aspects of Obama’s immigration approach — programs born from the Bush administration. The New York Times explains:

“… Ms. Napolitano has expanded a program that runs immigration checks on every person booked into local jails in some cities. And she recently announced the expansion of another program…that allows for cooperation between federal immigration agents and state and local police agencies.” (Oct. 18, 2009).

The first policy means that any immigrant that lands in jail for whatever reason faces potential deportation. And although the law was created by Bush to deal with immigrants who committed “serious crimes,” Latino communities have long known this claim to be a fraud. Officers instead arrest immigrants on minor or manufactured charges and alter their lives forever.

The second mentioned program will greatly increase these injustices. Before Bush, immigration laws were enforced by the nationally-run immigration department, with the rationale being that local police were meant to protect and serve communities. Now, local police are being enlisted to hunt down immigrants, most of whom are no danger to anybody and productive members of their communities.

The dangerous result is that immigrant and Latino families will be pushed further into society’s shadows: they will be less willing to call police if they witness or fall victim to serious crimes, suffer from domestic violence, or are victims of hate crimes. If they are not paid by their employer — a very regular occurrence — no one will be held accountable.

These types of crimes will be greatly encouraged with Obama’s new policy, alongside another form of abuse. Many Latino communities have become familiar with police picking up suspected immigrants off the street and sending them to deportation facilities — with no crime committed. Knowing that these racial profiling abuses would likely increase with local police becoming immigration enforcers, the Obama Administration gave lip-service to the increased “oversight” of the expanded policy, but little action is likely to follow, and civil rights violations will almost certainly increase.

Another Bush policy being expanded under Obama is the controversial E-verify system, which gives governmental access to employers' employment records, with the intention of verifying the legitimate documents of employees. Aside from the above-mentioned hardships this is already creating for thousands of families, the system is accused of being highly dysfunctional and error-ridden, like its predecessor the “no match" letter.

"No match" letters were mailed to workers and employers alike to notify them that a worker’s social security number didn’t match — implying that the worker was using a fake number to gain employment. The "no match" system was recently scrapped, likely due to the enormous errors being committed and consequent outcry (this writer can personally attest that the system was flawed, since my Caucasian, Indiana-born domestic partner had such a letter addressed to her).

These policies of Obama’s represent a drastic swerving to the right over immigration. But he’s just following the Democratic Party line, itself becoming hysterically anti-immigrant. High ranking Democrat Charles Schumer is leading the Democrat offensive, helping create a highly punitive “immigration reform” bill that includes Bush-era border militarization.

So far, this bill consists only of “general principles" -- polices agreed upon to appease the section of big business that benefits from immigrant labor. Highly skilled immigrants will be favored, lower skilled deported; some immigrants will be allowed to stay and work, while others are hunted down like animals. This divide and conquer strategy has already won over some immigrant and labor groups, who wrongly view the bill as “a step in the right direction.” The Democrats have spoken at length about their immigration philosophy; they want to provide corporations with sufficient cheap labor while demonizing “undesirable” immigrants.

Why the right turn? Since having taken power of both Congress and the Presidency, the Democrats have proven to be a very proficient tool for the corporate elite, following much of the same polices created by Bush.

The enormous public anger over these policies creates in the Democrats an urgent need for distraction. Rather than focus on the super-rich that are profiting from the recession and the politicians feeding them trillions in tax dollars, the Democrats would rather have our scorn funneled toward society’s most vulnerable population.

Always left out in the immigration discussion is why immigrants enter the U.S. at all. U.S. corporate-controlled foreign policy — under NAFTA and CAFTA — forced cheaply produced U.S. goods into the markets of poor countries to the south. Impoverished farmers and others were forced out of their country (where they would rather have stayed) to feed themselves and their families. U.S. corporations took further advantage of the situation by paying slave wages across the border and by paying immigrants in the U.S. below-poverty wages with no benefits. Speaking out against these injustices equals deportation.

Consequently, wages for both U.S. and Latin American workers are lowered by this divide and conquer tactic. Scapegoating immigrants is absolutely crucial to this strategy working.

Therefore, the only progressive solution to immigration is to unite all workers against the planned corporate offensive: CAFTA and NAFTA must be eliminated, and all workers in the U.S. must be given not only equal rights, but a livable wage. To achieve this, unions must fight harder to organize not only immigrants, but the millions of other workers who have little or no rights on the job. By doing so, corporations will be unable to exploit any worker so as to lower the wages of all workers. These lofty goals would be easier to accomplish if immigrant and labor groups diverted their energy and resources away from the Democratic Party, so that they could be used instead for real social change.

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org). He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

 Senator Russell Feingold

Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom

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were described by family and friends as a "clean-cut and faithful couple---good kids." Channon was a senior at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where she met Christopher. She and Chris went out on a Saturday dinner date, after which Channon called her mom and told her that they were on the way to visit friends. But Channon and Christopher never arrived at their friends' house---or returned home. The next day, the mutilated and burned remains of Chris Newsom were found along a railroad track. Two days later, Channon's battered and burned body was recovered from a trash bin. Channon and Chris had been kidnapped after a carjacking, then brutally gang-raped and murdered. According to reports, they were subjected to lengthy torture in each other's presence, injected with chemical disinfectats to destroy DNA evidence, then strangled and shot. This appalling attack is more than a case study in sociopathic evil. It is also a case study in journalistic malpractice. Unless you tune in to the local Knoxville news, you are most likely hearingabout this heinous crime for the first time---even though it took place last January. True, there are some 17,000 murders committed in the U.S. each year, but this double murder was clearly far more barbaric, far more monstrous than most. I spent six years in law enforcement and have seen my share of war-ravaged third-world nations, but the deliberate and abject inhumanity of this case, and what it says about our culture, certainly got my attention. Yet, this story has failed to attract the attention of the national media. Could it be because the two victims were white and the five defendants are black? Regrettably, there is nothing new about the racial aspect of this story. Although blacks represent just 12 percent of the U.S. population, black perpetrators are convicted by their peers in more than half of all murder and manslaughter cases. And, per-capita black-on-white crime is far more prevalent than the inverse. The underlying social factors contributing to such racially unbalanced crime statistics have been delineated by many conservative black leaders and academicians. However, their solutions---most notably promoting individual responsibility and accountability rather than reliance on the nanny state and subscription to the "victimization" mentality---contradict liberal politicalobjectives, which seek to maintain black folks' status as wards of the state. I draw your attention to this case not only to mourn the loss of a beautiful young couple, but also to call attention to a despicable double standard in our mainstream media. In 1998, three white men in Jasper, Texas, beat a black man, James Byrd, then chained him to the back of a pickup truck and dragged him three miles to his death. Not surprisingly, Byrd's murder received national media atention---as it should have. Of course, when the Left media jumps on a racial issue, especially in the run-up to a presidential election, Democrat politicians will be rushing the podium---in this case, opportunistically calling for "hate crimes" legislation. Then-Governor of Texas George Bush said there was little need for such legislation---after all, two of the defendants were sentenced to death and the third received a life sentence. That did not stop the NAACP from producing a political ad featuring the following voice-over from Mr. Byrd's daughter: "My father was killed. He was beaten, chained and dragged three miles to his death, all because he was black. So, when Governor George W. Bush refused to support hate-crimeslegislation, it was like my father was killed all over again." Clearly, hate was a motivating factor in Jasper, but it was also a motivating factor in Knoxville, which leads us to ask: Why do white-on-black hate crimes invariably result in a media feeding frenzy, while black-on-white hate crimes receive nary a mention? It is notable that both the Jasper and Knoxville crimes occurred at about the same period in presidential-election cycles---which perhaps explains the deafening silence of the national media's coverage of the Knoxville case. On the other hand, for the last year, the Left media was busy convicting three white Duke University lacrosse players for another "hate crime" ---the alleged gang rape of a black woman named Crystal Gail Mangum. Millions of dollars in defense-lawyer fees later, it turns out that Mangum was a liar and the real victims were in fact the accused: David Evans, Reade Seligmann and Colin Finnerty. Egg still fresh on their faces, the national media quickly moved on to Don Imus and his racially insensitive remarks. In fact, the only black-on-white crime given as much media attention as the Byrd and Duke cases was O. J. Simpson's murder of his ex-wife and her companion---but that story was an MSM mainstay not because of Simpson's race, but because of his celebrity status. So what about Channon and Christopher? News of their murders was briefly posted on the AP wire by Knoxville news outlets, but major media outlets such as CNN, CBS, The New York Times and The Washington Post have yet to mention it, much less headline it. Clearly, there's a double standard when it comes to the media's coverage of interracial crime. What about the double standard when it comes to race-hustlers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton (who fabricated the Tawana Brawley rape hoax)? The only difference in racists such as Jackson and Sharpton and those in the KKK is that the latter are not Leftmedia celebs. Is the NAACP ready to crank out some political ads on hate crimes? Are Teddy Kennedy and all the congressional race-baiters calling for additional hate-crimes legislation? Not for this case they're not. The five men charged with the rape and murder of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom will make their next court appearance on 17 May. It's safe to say that they will do so without a satellite news-link truck anywhere in sight. --------------------------------------------------
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