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National Educational Association (NEA): Stated Socialist/Communist Agenda?

2011-03-27T15:08:00.000-07:00

This article is a very valuable document showing the goals of the NEA nearly 70 years ago in 1932. This is about the time that William Z. Foster wrote Toward Soviet America and the Humanists wrote their First Manifesto. It should be read and kept as a clear understanding of the subversive plans the NEA had for using America's schools. Many people think of these goals as recent. This article should serve to set them straight.

Concerning the movement toward a one-world government today, if the power elite are to accomplish their objectives, traditional values would, of course, have to be undermined. In that regard, education has played a critical role for many years, and a typical example can be found in The Tenth Yearbook of the National Education Association's Department of Superintendence, published in February 1932, and titled Character Education, in which one reads:

"Relativity must replace absolutism in the realm of morals as well as in the spheres of physics and biology.

"...If the individual is to be happy in the contemporary order, he must be open-minded with respect to new values and new arrangements.

"...Loyalty to the family must be merged into loyalty to the community, loyalty to the community into loyalty to the nation, and loyalty to the nation into loyalty to mankind. The citizen of the future must be a citizen of the world.

"...Also, within the limits of a particular society, individualistic and competitive impulses must be subordinated increasingly to social and cooperative tendencies.

"...Interdependence rather than independence is the rule of life.

"...Under the condition of freedom and plenty generated by industrial society, the youth of the country are abandoning the severe sex taboos of the past; the sanctity of the marriage relationship is being challenged; the dogmas and ceremonies of the church are losing their power.

"...Until we have a more equitable distribution of property and income in this country, great numbers of families will remain totally unfit agencies of character education.

"...The church seems never to have been able to win either the masses or the statesmen of the Western nations to the Christian way of life. "...The position of the church today is one of confusion and uncertainty. It has lost much of the authority with which it at one time was clothed.

"...Only when it employs the outworn dogmas of the past and appeals to certain of the traditional prejudices of the people does it appear to have confidence in its own pronouncements.

"...This analysis shows a need for statements of objectives which....stimulate the creation of new moralities in accord with our changing society.

"...The center of attention is not to be some traits to be expressed, some rules of conduct, some ideal of truth or beauty. The center of attention is to be the situation.

"...The old structure passes. Religion, morality, business, family, school, and state change.

"...Emotional conditioning does determine a great deal of one's attitudes toward persons, things, and ideas, and is responsible for a large part of one's outlook on life. Conditioning is therefore a process which may be employed by the teacher or parent to build up attitudes in the child and predispose him to the actions by which these attitudes are expressed.

"...It is probable that the chauvinistic teaching of much of the history of the home country is responsible for a good share of the international friction and conflict.

"...An eminent teacher of ethics, Professor George Herbert Palmer (said): 'Many here (New England) carry a conscience about with them which makes us say, "How much better off they would be with none!"'

"...Education must be redirected if it is to become the chief means whereby society will attempt to remake itself.

"...School life will begin with the nursery school and extend to include adult education in various forms. "...It may come to be, in this changing world, that society will come quickly to support and control a program of education extending, for the individual, from the cradle to the grave.

"...As need arises, it will offer the individual opportunity to change quickly or slowly from one vocation or profession to another.

"...The question of demand and supply of workers in the various professions and occupations may in time also become a part of our social planning.

"The objective of character education is to teach the child that he will do the best possible thing in each situation, old and new.

"Presumable the person which has specialized in child psychology and other sciences is better prepared to engineer a group of boys and girls in certain socialized activities than is the lay parent...."

Does this sound like the sexual liberation, situation ethics, social engineering, lifelong learning, school-to-work, redistribute-the-wealth, interdependence, and world citizenship promoted and accepted by many toward the end of the 20th century?

The world government of the power elite will be Socialist in nature, and thus during the 1930s, the United States began to move toward Socialism at the national level. In 1940, former Indiana Congressman Samuel Pattengill authored Smoke-Screen, in which he wrote:

"I have not believed the immediate threat is Communism. The outright confiscation of property, and the overnight destruction of liberty are not likely. The danger today is something else. It is creeping collectivism.

"...The progress will be gradual but the end inevitable. There will be no sudden coup d'etat. The march will be step by step, and by muffled tread. It will move under the smoke-screen of laudable 'objectives' to its hidden goal. That goal is National Socialism.

"...We are yet a long way from National Socialism of the Hitler species. We will probably never get that variety. But that we are moving toward some form of National Socialism and away from our form of government seems hard to not believe.

"...What is really at stake in America today is our form of government. The issue is "Freedom or Feudalism."

Congressman Pattengill's reference to the march being "step by step" and his warning about a future feudalism are striking, because in the April 1974 edition of the Council on Foreign Relations' Foreign Affairs, Rhodes Scholar and CFR member Richard Gardner declared that

"the 'house of world order' will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down.

"...but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault."

Gardner in this article went on to explain how GATT would be part of this, and the GATT's World Trade Organization has today become something of a feudal mechanism whereby the global elite are managing labor serfs in a global economy.

The plan developed many decades ago was that in order to achieve International Socialism with a World Socialist Government, nations (including the U.S.) would first have to move toward the National Socialism about which Congressman Pettengill warned, and then those National Socialist nations could more easily be merged under an International Socialist World Government. Likewise, regional economic arrangements (e.g., NAFTA, the European Community, etc.) would be formed and then merged into a world economic structure such as the WTO, which the power elite would then say had to be managed by a World Socialist Government.

Most people are already familiar with how the global economy has caused American jobs to go overseas to third world nations and how the WTO has coerced the U.S. Congress into changing our laws. Senior writer for the Chicago Tribune, Richard Longworth, in Global Squeeze (1998) wrote that

"...the big story of the twenty-first century will be globalization's impact on the nations of the world. But already, secure jobs at ever-rising wages are becoming a thing of the past.

"...The poor (in the U.S.) are getting poorer, and there are more of them.

"...This is the 'race to the bottom,' a process that drives income ever lower.

"This is the dehumanization of labor. No other major country treats its workers as commodities in this way, as raw materials or components that can be bargained to the lowest price.

"...Globalization has already weakened the ability of the governments to control their own economies.

"The global economy is a reality and cannot be denied. But uncontrolled, it can destroy these civilizations, to the point that we will wake one day to discover that we are neither consumers nor producers nor citizens at all."

How does this bargaining of workers to the lowest level play out in the cities and towns of Florida and all across America? Let's say there's an influential businessman who has a grass-cutting or carpet-cleaning or fast food business or one of many other enterprises. And let's say he gets work permits for 10 migrant workers whom he lodges in a 2 bedroom house. He then goes to his 10 lower middle-class American workers, each of whom has a wife and children and small houses with mortgages, and tells his workers that they are being let go because he can pay his migrant workers a lot less because they share expenses (each would pay only $10 per month on a $100 electric bill, for instance). All it takes is for one businessman in an industry in a community to do this, and others in the same industry in the community are forced to do likewise if they are to remain competitive. This type of thing is happening all across America, and the consequences for American workers and their families are traumatic.

Of course, if we are to have a world government, there will have to be an enforcer. And in that regard, the U.N. tribunal's arrest of former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic is precedent-setting. Some years ago, the World Federalist Association, which promotes world federal government, outlined a plan for the U.N. to have agencies such as the International Criminal Court whereby national sovereignty would be gradually eroded and a world federation established. President Clinton wrote a letter to the WFA wishing them in general "future success," and Clinton, of course prosecuted the war against Milosevic over Kosovo. Recently, the Bush administration threatened to withhold reconstruction aid unless Yugoslavia turned Milosevic over to the U.N. tribunal at the Hague on the charge of crimes against humanity. Though the current head of Yugoslavia protested, leading Serbians turned Milosevic over for trial. Of course this is hypocritical, because while current President Bush and former Presidents Bush and Clinton have approved of this action, they at the same time have applauded Mikhail Gorbachev even though he prosecuted the Soviet war against Afghanistan, which included exploding toys that maimed and perhaps even killed some Afghan children. Also, it raises the question of whether Henry Kissinger will be turned over to a U.N. tribunal for what Cambodian leaders have called his illegal war against them 30 years ago. And since the vast majority of the international community was opposed to former President Bush's invasion of Panama, could he be taken to a U.N. tribunal for trial?

But how would such a U.N. tribunal get around Americans' Constitutional rights? I've said for some time that it would be through crises. Recently, more than one mother has killed her children, and so the cry goes up for the government to monitor families carefully because children may be at-risk. Furthermore, eco-terrorists have recently been committing arson in the northwest, and on June 25, the CBS Evening News showed one of the victims saying:

"A month ago, if you'd asked me, I would have said I didn't want to live with security systems ruling my life because I didn't want a fortress mentality. And now I welcome them."

Crises cause Americans to be more willing to give up Constitutional privacy rights. And every time there's a shooting, there are calls to limit our Second Amendment right to bear arms. and without that right, how can we defend ourselves if a U.N. tribunal comes after us?

What really happened to the Hartleys on Falcon Lake?

2010-10-25T18:18:00.000-07:00

Analysis: I know I normally start off my posts with excerpts from news stories, but there are too many small pieces of this story in separate articles. I'll try my best to encapsulate everything here.

You probably already know the basic story, but in case you don't... David and Tiffany Hartley went for a ride on their jet skis last month on Falcon Lake, whichstraddles the Texas-Mexico border. There are some beautiful church ruins (#12 on the map) that are partially submerged on the Mexican side that they were trying to check out. While they were near that area, Tiffany says they were approached by men in three boats who started shooting. They began to flee towards the US side of the lake, but then David got shot and fell off his jet ski. Tiffany tried to pull him up onto her ski, but she says they started shooting at her. So, she had to leave him and beat feet to avoid getting shot herself.

Tiffany has provided a few different versions of the story, which has caused authorities on both sides of the border to be a little suspicious. David's body hasn't been found yet, and it will probably never be found. I've also read accounts that say David was shot from the front, which doesn't jive with him getting shot while heading away from the "pirates" towards the US side of the lake. The same account said the Hartleys had just returned from a luxury cruise and bought a house filled with new furniture shortly after attending a seminar for people having financial trouble.

The latest analysis by Stratfor says the shooting was a case of mistaken identity. David apparently had worked in Reynosa, and their car had Tamaulipas plates. This led Los Zetas to believe the Hartleys may be rival DTO Gulf cartel scouts. Stratfor also surmises that the killing was unauthorized, and the accidental work of young amateurs who have probably been killed by their cartel bosses already. The head Mexican investigator has already been killed, with his severed head delivered to Mexican authorities, and the search for David's body has been suspended indefinitely.

So what really happened? I have to tell you, this story doesn't pass the smell test for me. There's too much that doesn't make sense, and Tiffany has told too many different versions of what happened. I keep going back to the motive of the alleged shooters. Robbery (which is what pirates do)? No way...two jet skiers wouldn't exactly have a lot of cash on them, and I haven't read anywhere that the pirates took David's jet ski - or even tried to take Tiffany's. Retribution? I was told by a reporter friend of mine who got an off-the-record tip that the Hartleys may have been involved in some drug activity, but that hasn't been fleshed out enough. For fun? I still think it's too dangerous for cartels to start randomly shooting at innocent Americans just to do it because they know the response will likely be strong and swift.

I think the Stratfor explanation makes sense. I know that many DTOs are hard up for shooters, so sometimes they have to hire younger punks with itchy trigger fingers. I just didn't expect that Los Zetas - probably the strongest DTO next to the Sinaloa Federation - would be so hard up that they'd have to go that route. Then again, they did just execute 72 South American migrants who refused to work for them. The more-then-slightly cynical explanation that "the wife did it" also makes sense, especially if the Hartley's were hard up for money and she was looking for a life insurance payout. However, we know Los Zetas were definitely involved in the incident - whatever really happened - and it's unlikely Tiffany had entered into some sort of arrangement with them.

The Mexican authorities do not want to get back in this game for fear of losing more investigators, and they've already spent way more time looking for David than they would have looking for a Mexican citizen. I highly doubt David's body will ever be found - I agree with Stratfor that Los Zetas had to eliminate it - and we'll never have an account of events outside of Tiffany's side of the story. One can only hope that US citizens actually start heeding the advice given in State Department travel warnings and stay away from places like Falcon Lake known to be highly active drug smuggling areas.

Crime Rankings for Cities and States—Most Dangerous Cities–Crime in America

2009-10-25T18:23:00.000-07:00

Crime Rankings for Cities and States—Most Dangerous Cities–Crime in America.Net

Updated with four new sources-fall, 2010

There are two kinds of readers that come to this site. Some are interested in complexity and options regarding crime in cities, states and countries.

Others want the most direct sources ranking cities as to dangerousness/safety. According to Google, it’s one of the most popular terms for crime related searches.

Please note that it’s nearly impossible to compare crime in cities with any real sense of accuracy (explained below) so explore the first set of sources with caution. Not all cities appear on all lists depending on what’s measured.Note that some studies from commercial sources are harshly criticized by criminologists for what they choose to measure. We recommend that you look at everything available, acknowledge what was measured and come to your own conclusions.

For those who want the most direct answer as to cities and crime, see the following links:

http://www.cjgsu.net/initiatives/HomRates-PR-2010-01-21.htm. There are four tables from the Georgia State University providing homicide rates by city. Generally speaking (but not always) homicides and violent crimes rise and fall together.

The following are commercial publications. Note that some criminologists have issues with the interpretation of data:

http://os.cqpress.com/citycrime/2009/CityCrimeRankings2009.htm

http://blogs.forbes.com/francescalevy/2010/10/12/real-estate-lifestyle-danger-housing-cities/

http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/23/most-dangerous-cities-lifestyle-real-estate-dangerous-american-cities.html

http://www.forbes.com/2010/02/11/americas-most-miserable-cities-business-beltway-miserable-cities_2.html

http://www.morganquitno.com/cit05pop.htm

http://www.morganquitno.com/safecity.htm

Wikipedia offers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_cities_by_crime_rate.

http://www.city-data.com/City Data carries pages of general interest data for all cities and metropolitan areas–it’s searchable by zipcode–for crime related data; see ” Top 101 City Lists” on the front page.

Buying or renting a house:

Many come to this site for assistance in choosing a safe place to live. For an article addressing buying or renting, see http://crimeinamerica.net/2010/04/29/crime-and-buying-a-house-most-dangerous-cities-crime-in-america-net/. We caution readers to personally investigate the immediate and surrounding neighborhoods as an important first step.

Readers who want details: Additional crime sources available, Comparisons of individual communities, states , and countries

The material below provides some of the best sources in the country:

Additional sources for crime data:

Start with the FBI http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm .

Michigan State University offers a wide array of data sources. See http://staff.lib.msu.edu/harris23/crimjust/stats.htm#reports2.

There are resources comparing states:

http://blogs.kansascity.com/crime_scene/2010/04/which-states-are-most-crimeridden.html

There are resources comparing countries:

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murders-per-capita

There are resources comparing individual communities within cities (most dangeruos communities)

http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2010/10/04/25-most-dangerous-neighborhoods-2010/

There are resources with state-to-state comparisons of the most stolen cars:

http://crimeinamerica.net/2010/09/23/the-most-stolen-cars-in-the-nation-the-most-stolen-cars-by-state/

There are resources comparing states and teenager criminal or dangerous behavior:

http://crimeinamerica.net/2010/09/20/highest-states-for-teenagers-carrying-a-weapon-%e2%80%9cor%e2%80%9d-why-are-rural-states-so-violent/

Additional sources:

http://www.crimereports.com/

http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/NACJD/ucr.html

Background–the difficulity of comparing jurisdictions–reported and unreported crime and crime rates:

Crime statistics are confusing and frequently misunderstood. There are criminologists who spend their professional lives investigating the complexity of crime data.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) collects crimes reported to law enforcement agencies through state collection agencies and releases statistics for the nation, states, metropolitan areas and cities twice a year.

The National Crime Survey from the National Institute of Justice releases crime survey data for the country based on reported and unreported crime and does not offer crime statistics for states, metro areas or cities. See http://crimeinamerica.net/crime-rates-united-states/ for differences as to FBI and National Crime Survey data.

The FBI frowns on using data reported to law enforcement agencies to make comparisons of one city to another, and for good reasons.

Most crime is not reported to the police (thus the need for the National Crime Survey to get a picture of total crime) so there is a lot of room for error. Law enforcement agencies can affect the amount of crime reported through aggressive interactions with citizens.

The FBI and state crime data collection agencies try to enforce common definitions on what constitutes a crime, but individual officers can (and do) downgrade crimes where definitions are vague. For example, an overaggressive person (or people) asking for money could be guilty of panhandling or robbery; it depends on how you interpret the aggressiveness of the person “asking” for money.

Some cities have been known to downgrade crimes. The past is filled with documented examples. Some cities do poor jobs of collecting and analyzing crime data.

Most crime rankings are based on crimes per 1,000 residents which immediately creates an unfair playing field if you get thousands of tourists or workers per day. Those thousands of “outsiders” will inevitably commit crimes or inadvertently create opportunities for crime that would not exist in cities or states not getting a lot of tourists or daily workers.

So the bottom line is that crimes and crimes reported can and will differ for reasons having little or nothing to do with the quality of policing or crime control strategies.

Having said this, the warning from the FBI is routinely ignored by every newspaper in the country; all report on how their city or county or state ranks regarding crime.

So if you choose to look at rankings, please do so with an open mind. A city or state may have crime problems, but hundreds of thousands or millions of its citizens and tourists and workers move throughout their city in relative safety on a daily basis.

North America Doesn't Exist

2008-07-09T21:02:00.001-07:00

About every six months or so, the media provide a fleeting show of North American unity. Whether on the shores of the Mexican Caribbean, the forests of Quebec, or the hurricane-torn streets of New Orleans, the script is pretty much the same. It includes a lot of back-slapping and almost no public information.

These encounters—the trilateral summits—would be imminently forgettable if not for what happens behind the photo ops....

Business leaders and government officials from the United States, Canada, and Mexico have been meeting to expand on the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement since the trinational summit in Waco, Texas in March of 2005. Ostensibly, the premise is that this great continent of three nations must bond to create a safe, free, and prosperous haven in a threatening world.

The only problem is, North America—at least as portrayed in the summits—doesn't exist.

Flunking Geography

There is a North American land mass—a fact confirmed by any one of the 515 million people who at this moment are compelled by gravity to stand, sit or lie upon it. But nobody can even agree on its borders.

To the North, the mass breaks up into a vast expanse of ice, impossible to draw on a map as its boundaries recede due to global warming. This is creating consternation and confusion—and not just among polar bears. For the first time since modern science began recording, the fabled Northwest Passage that connects Asia and Europe via North America is free of ice, causing an international dispute over who controls it.

The confusion is even worse regarding the southern edge of our shared continent.

Children in the United States are taught that the North American continent begins in the North—which is always the "top," passes through a gray area called "Canada," to reach a vibrant, multi-colored zone divided into 50 states that most good students can name. It then begins its decline, gradually petering out below the Rio Grande. If the kids were to ask their parents where the southern limit is, they too would probably just shrug.

Mexican school children, however, will answer immediately that there really is no North America. They are taught that North and South America are a single continent—"America," without the "s." That's why if you say you're "American," they will reply, "But what country are you from?"

Turning to the experts, most geographers have decided that North America extends down through Panama. (To make matters worse, Panama used to be part of South America when it belonged to Colombia, but that's another story). That means that North America encompasses 23 sovereign nations and 16 colonies, or "dependencies" as they are referred to in this not-so-post-colonial era.

So why this brief geography lesson? Because the ongoing geographical debate offers important insights into what's wrong with the North American Free Trade Agreement and the son-of-NAFTA—the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP).

The problems of defining the region begin with geography, but they get way worse when politics, economics, and culture are thrown in.

Commercial Bloc-heads

The "North American Free Trade Agreement" is actually a compound misnomer. The "North America" in NAFTA is an invention of a particular point in history and a particular set of economic and geopolitical motivations.

"Trade" under the agreement has been liberalized but is far from "free." Politically powerful sectors in the United States maintain protections, whether openly in the form of tariffs or covertly as phytosanitary barriers or subsidies. All countries maintain some barriers for strategic sectors and products—often a reasonable practice, especially in the case of developing countries like Mexico.

Finally, the "agreement" did involve the Congress and civil society organizations at the moment of approval in the United States, but in the negotiating stages and certainly in Mexico, civil society was shut out of the process. NAFTA's extension into the SPP was even more non-consensual since it did not involve congressional approval or signed agreements. In Mexico, NAFTA isn't legally an agreement but rather a treaty, giving it a higher juridical stature than in the United States.

But the biggest problem here is the assumed commonality of interests. The most touted rationale for NAFTA is that the United States, Canada, and Mexico must join to form a trade bloc to compete in the global market with other trade blocs. This assumes that the three nations are on the same team. The Security and Prosperity Agreement even formed a "North American Competitiveness Council" made up of Walmart, Chevron, Ford, Suncor, Scotiabank, Mexicana, and other major corporations to represent the team interests.

But when we look at the play on the field, there is very little teamwork involved. In multilateral forums each country plays by its own game plan. In the World Trade Organization, Mexico forms part of the Group of 20 to protest U.S. and Canadian agricultural subsidies. Canada and the United States have faced off on numerous trade conflicts among themselves, many of them—like the softwood lumber case—the subject of drawn-out and bitter negotiations. Mexico has also had disputes with its supposed team mates, including the tuna-dolphin dispute, the entry of Mexican trucks into the United States under the agreed-to terms of NAFTA, and the tomato wars between northern Mexico and Florida.

If the bloc fails to act as a bloc of nations on the international level, its lack of cohesiveness is even more obvious from the point of view of its major corporations. Globalization opens up a world where everyone is out for themselves in search of cost-cutting production, cheaper resources, and closer markets. Corporations based in the United States, Canada, or Mexico have no loyalty whatsoever to building North America as a competitive bloc. An executive of a Hewlett-Packard subsidiary described how the company decided to move operations from the Mexican border to Indonesia. It was a no-brainer, he said, the labor was cheaper and it was closer to the expanding Chinese market. Like a game of Chinese checkers, the company now seeks to leap production from Indonesia directly into China as its next strategic move. NAFTA partner Mexico is left with nothing but unemployment.

Even the most regionally integrated industries, like the auto industries, measure their success not in terms of integration but by how successfully they can break down the production process into ever-cheaper components. This allows them to offshore labor intensive phases to Mexico where labor is cheap, while maintaining sales and research, management, and research and development in the United States. If anything changes in that formula, the whole concept of regional integration would be thrown out the window in search of a different global strategy. Recent negotiations to reduce wages in Mexican auto plants of Ford and General Motors based on the threat to move production to China are good examples of the logic.

Although corporate strategies are global not regional, corporations do have a reason to push the NAFTA-SPP agenda. Corporations that have operations in the three nations have an interest in developing mechanisms to lower all costs and barriers. In this sense they seek to create not a trade bloc to compete against their operations in other countries, but a pilot project for territorial reorganization along the lines of a corporate wish list. In this conception, "North America" is not a block of countries defined by a common geography and purpose, so much as a territory delineated for the optimal use of capital.

This realization explodes the first myth of "regional integration" under NAFTA. Far from a homogeneous process of integration, it promotes a curious blend of integration and fragmentation of territory. Mexico, for example, has been split in two. The North, where irrigation, climate, and topography provide advantages in agriculture and industrialization is more advanced, is tightly integrated into the U.S. economy. U.S. companies selling in U.S. markets now control much of production and Mexican export companies are concentrated in this region.

Southern Mexico remains outside this scheme and always will. Even the World Bank has recognized this in a study called "Why NAFTA did not reach the South." The response is the Plan Puebla-Panama, with a focus on public-sector loans for major infrastructure development, resource extraction, and energy grids. Since the region is too indigenous, too remote, and too rebellious for productive investment, the southern states of Mexico have been shunted off to join Central America as a facilitator region to provide natural resources and serve as a conduit for the North-South movement of goods. The local populations are considered largely extraneous.

Security for Who?

The issue of security is where the myth of a unified North America is most starkly revealed. Security didn't figure into the original NAFTA agenda, although it was implied that greater economic integration would result in harmonization of foreign policy agendas. Sept. 11 and the Bush National Security Doctrine created a strong U.S. security agenda while at the same time creating tensions with the NAFTA partners.

Canadian business sought to avoid another border closure like the one following the World Trade Center attacks and was willing to concede on other issues to assure uninterrupted trade. The government was forced to accept U.S. Homeland Security measures such as a "no-fly" list that bars "suspect individuals," including dissidents, from air travel between the two nations.

The Mexican people, as in all of Latin America, reacted to U.S. unilateralism and the invasion of Iraq with a rise in anti-American sentiment and suspicion. But both National Action Party (PAN) presidents Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderon shared much of the Bush agenda and have entered into commitments under the SPP on security issues.

The security plan put forth in the SPP is an extension of the agenda of a nation that is the world's pre-eminent military power, a major target for international terrorist attacks, a proponent of unilateral action and pre-emptive strikes, and an advocate of military over diplomatic responses and U.S. hegemony the guarantee of global governance.

Mexico is a nation that is not a target of international terrorism, has had a foreign policy of neutrality, and whose primary security threat has historically been—the United States. Nonetheless, Mexico has had to accept the failure of the binational immigration reform agenda and cooperate in aspects of the U.S. Homeland Security agenda and other counter-terrorism programs. The latest and most radical project to come out of the SPP security agenda is Plan Mexico, or the Merida Initiative—a regional security plan developed in the context of the SPP that bundles counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, and border security measures into a new national security program for Mexico led by Washington.

The concept that Canada, the United States, and Mexico should forge a single security agenda as a non-existent continent is absurd and dangerous. Yet this is exactly what the SPP does. It is an agreement built on a convenient myth, a partnership that really consists of two countries subordinated to a superpower that agree to this subordination due to economic dependencies and the interests of corporations that cross borders seeking to maximize profits.

The New Geography

When the North American Free Trade Agreement was conceived, it was not a trinational—much less continental—affair. The negotiations focused on pasting together three separate agreements: the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement—already in effect since 1989, a new U.S.-Mexico agreement and, to a lesser degree, a series of Canada-Mexico rules.

Few people realize that the resulting NAFTA reflects these differences. Critical goods for the United States, such as oil and corn, are traded under completely separate rules with Canada and with Mexico in the context of NAFTA depending on the relative bargaining power.

What has happened in the 14 years since NAFTA has fractured the continent even more. Led by the transnational corporations for whom it was designed, in practical terms NAFTA today covers an expanse of territory that runs roughly from Mexico City in the south, to mid-Canada. Through a growing network of consolidated production chains, trade links, and infrastructure development, this region—with the exception of poverty zones of little interest for capital expansion—has undergone rapid processes of concentration and integration.

Under the "vision" of North America forged under NAFTA and its follow-up, the Security and Prosperity Partnership, the three governments have attempted to convince their people that their fate lies along a common path—a path defined by geography, cemented by shared values, and marked by the assumption that just one road leads to the fulfillment of everyone's goals. But it has become increasingly clear that instead of being a pact between three nations, NAFTA constitutes a roadmap for U.S. regional hegemony.

Not So Fast ...

Right wing organizations like the John Birch Society that have been up in arms over the supposed creation of a North American Union and the construction of NAFTA superhighways, may find comfort in the thesis that North America doesn't—and shouldn't—exist. But just because I argue that each nation must define and defend its public good, doesn't mean I agree that there is a neo-Aztec conspiracy to take over the United States. The greatest threat to every country in the region is the attempt of the Bush administration to impose its failed trade and security agenda at home and abroad, and the supranational powers of transnational corporations.

Should We All Go Home Now?

The question remaining is: if North America doesn't exist, why should Canadians, U.S. citizens, and Mexicans work together to shape the NAFTA and SPP processes?

The trinational networks that have formed to monitor and question both NAFTA and the SPP play a critical role. Although each nation has its own priorities and demands, the networks serve to share information and compare notes on how regional integration affects citizens' interests.

Grassroots organizations from the three countries face common challenges and common threats. The indisputably high levels of trade, investment, immigration, and cultural exchange that exist between our countries mean that we live daily lives that overlap across borders. Maybe it isn't a region or a trading bloc in the terms conceived of under the SPP and the differences between us are many and a source of strength. But we are neighbors—as nations, as communities, and as families.

These organizations, meeting in binational or trinational conferences and to protest at official summits, explode the myth of regional homogeneity while at the same time making common cause. They expose the lie that there is only one path forward by developing alternatives in policy and practice. Precisely on the basis of their different political contexts and geographical, ethnic, and economic diversity, they have the potential to build a crossborder movement for social justice to counteract plans for regional integration designed and implemented exclusively in the upper echelons of business and government.

Fourteen years after implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, a majority of the population in all three countries believes the agreement has had a net negative effect on their nation and it turns out that the North American Free Trade Agreement is a misnomer in every one of its terms—it wasn't an agreement, it isn't free trade, and North America doesn't exist. So now what?

First, stop extending it. The SPP must be thoroughly reviewed and revamped. Most likely this review will lead to construction of different forums for trinational coordination that separate the trade/investment and security areas, balance out the preponderant influence of the United States government, and open up proceedings and representation to the public.

Second, stop copying it. Although NAFTA is the only trade agreement to extend into an SPP, the Free Trade Agreement model enshrined there has become a template for other agreements and, in the case of the United States, pressures to impose security plans tend to follow close behind. The Merida Initiative contains resources for Central American countries to integrate the CAFTA region into the regional security plan.

Finally, analyze and evaluate the SPP—the forces behind it, the decisions it makes that affect us, and the directions it plans for the future. Citizens have the right and the obligation to know about and participate in mapping the future, and when they do it's likely to look far different from the future mapped for us by corporate and government leaders behind the closed doors of the Security and Prosperity Partnership.

Laura Carlsen (lcarlsen(a)ciponline.org) is director of the Americas Policy Program (www.americaspolicy.org) in Mexico City. This piece was part of a talk at the Lessons from NAFTA Conference. Check out the Americas Mexico blog at www.americasmexico.blogspot.com.

SuperCorridor Defeat? Don't Bet On It

2008-05-21T11:21:00.000-07:00

The title refers to the I-69/Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC) portion of the North American SuperCorridor Coalition (NASCO) project. The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) announced that, for now at least, it nixed this part of the $184 billion scheme calling for:

-- a 4000 mile toll road network of transportation corridors;

-- 10 lanes or 1200 feet wide;

-- two or more trans-Texas corridors being considered; one paralleling I-35 from Laredo through San Antonio, Austin, Dallas/Fort Worth to Gainesville; the other an extension following US 59 from Texarkana through Houston to Laredo or the Rio Grande Valley;

-- others would parallel I-45 from Dallas/FortWorth to Houston and I-10 from El Paso to Orange;

-- they'll accommodate car and truck traffic;

-- rail lines;

-- pipelines and utilities; and

-- communication systems.

It's planned across Texas from Mexico to Oklahoma, would have annexed huge private land tracts, and may later on take much of it anyway. Enough to threaten organizations like the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association (TSCRA), Texas Farm Bureau and other rural interests. Their member property rights are at stake, so they fought it, and for now, prevailed - at least partly, but the matter is far from settled.

On June 10, Executive Director Amadeo Saenz announced that TxDOT "narrowed the (TTC I-69) study area (to) existing highway (routes) whenever possible," and "any area (outside) an existing (one) will not be considered" except for necessary portions. NASCO's Texas highway remains viable. It's just a little less "Super" and for now will use mostly existing state highways and connect them to northern links.

The larger project is far more ambitious. It's to develop an international, integrated, secure superhighway running the length and breath of the continent for profit. It's to militarize and annex it as part of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) scheme - aka "Deep Integration" North American Union. If completed, it will extend nearly everywhere - North, South, East and West along four main cross-border regions:

-- an Atlantic Corridor, including: the Canada-US East Coast; the Champlain-Hudson Corridor; the Appalachian region; and the Gulf of Mexico;

-- a Central Eastern Corridor; an urban one through large cities and industrial areas; another through the Great Plains to the Canadian Prairies;

-- a Central Western Corridor, including the largest Mexican maquiladora concentration; and

-- a Pacific Corridor linking Fairbanks, Alaska to San Diego into Tijuana, Ciudad Obrego and Mazatlan, Mexico.

From north to south, it will extend from Fairbanks to Winnipeg, Manitoba; Edmonton, Alberta; and Windsor, Ontario, Canada through Kansas City, San Antonio and Laredo, Texas into Neuvo Laredo, Monterrey, Guadalajara, and the ports of Manzanillo, Colima and Lazaro Cardenas, Mexico. Other links will connect Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto, Canada to New York, Chicago, Indianapolis, Denver, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Memphis, Dallas, Houston with still more routes to follow - East to West, North to South across Canada, the US and Mexico.

Canada's plan is called CISCOR - the Canadian Intelligent SuperCorridor running west from Vancouver and Prince Rupert to Montreal and Halifax. Its web site explains it as follows: "The Saskatchen-based CISCOR Smart Inland Port Network will serve as the central logistics and coordination hub, creating a Canadian east-west land bridge (connecting) three major North American north-south corridors; North Americas SuperCorridor (NASCO), Canada America Mexico Corridor (CANAMEX) and River of Trade Corridor Coalition (ROTCC).

ROTCC was created in 2004 to facilitate trade across 3300 miles from Laredo, Texas to Detroit and into Canada. Another route along I-45 extends from Houston and the I-10 corridor and rail route from Los Angeles and Long Beach to Dallas/Fort Worth.

Overall, it will be a comprehensive energy and commerce-related transportation artery for trade and strategic resources with DHS and NORTHCOM in charge. They'll monitor and militarize it through a network of high-tech sensors and trackers to secure the continent for profit at the expense of the greater public good the way these schemes always work.

Part of the plan involves a proposed arrangement between NASCO and a company called Savi Networks - a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Hutchison Ports Holdings, a Chinese ports management firm. If instituted, it will generate huge revenues by paying NASCO 25 cents for each of the millions of "revenue-generating intermodal ocean cargo container(s)" using the supercorridor as well as along other north-south routes being planned. The idea is to install an RFID chip network and put them in containers as well for tracking. They'll monitor them from port of entry to final destination and make shippers pay tolls in addition to transportation costs. They'll, in turn, pass on costs to buyers.

Lockheed Martin runs a Global Transport Network (GTN) Command and Control Center for the military that provides electronic tracking. On its web site, Savi Networks says it "was formed to improve the efficiency and security of global trade (through its) SaviTrack system." It "utilizes a reliable network of wireless Automated Identification and Data Collection (AIDC) equipment and (Enterprise Resource Planning - ERP) software to provide shippers, logistics service providers, and terminal operators with precise and actionable information."

For now, the Texas artery will be less ambitious but still part of the grander scheme. For its part, I-69/TTC remains a government-private partnership whereby new roads will charge tolls for maximum revenue generation and make the public to pay the tab for their use.

Besides the scaled back I-69/TTC, another planned project is just as worrisome. It's called the TTC-35 600 mile corridor extension along I-35 from Oklahoma through Dallas/Forth Worth to Laredo to Mexico and possibly the Gulf Coast. A two-tiered environmental study for it began in spring 2004 and remains ongoing.

Tier One engendered sweeping opposition but not enough to stop it. Public hearings were held for input on potential corridor locations and promoted what's called the Preferred Corridor Alternative. Federal Highway Administration approval comes next, after which a Tier Two phase would identify proposed highway alignments and other modes and potential access points. Hearings would follow for further public input and be as likely to generate hostility as did the I-69/TTC project. It slowed SuperCorridor momentum, but in Texas and across the country it's very much alive and ongoing.

Powerful forces back it in spite of considerable opposition in states across the country. In support are organizations like:

-- the Council on Foreign Relation and its influential members; it backed business having "unlimited (cross-border) access in its 2005 report titled "Building a North American Community; its Task Force "applauds the announced 'Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP)' of North America" - aka North American Union and its SuperCorridor project; it also sees a step beyond with "a more ambitious vision of a new community by 2010 (giving) specific recommendations on how to achieve it."

-- the International Mobility & Trade Corridor Project (IMTC); it bills itself as a US - Canadian government and business coalition "promot(ing) improvements to mobility and security for the four border crossings between Whatcom County, Washington and the Lower Mainland of British Columbia" - combined called the Cascade Gateway;

-- the CANAMEX Corridor Coalition for a superhighway linking Mexico City to Edmonton, Alberta; it supports the "seamless and efficient transportation of goods, services, people and information between Canada, Mexico and the US;"

-- the Central North American Trade Corridor Association (CHATCA); it's for a Central North American Trade Corridor fully integrated in the global economy and refers to "5 T's" as "essential:" tourism, technology, trade, transportation and training;

-- the Ports to Plains Trade (PTP) Corridor; it supports a multimodal one from Mexico through the four PTP states of Texas, New Mexico, Colorado and Oklahoma up to Canada and the Pacific Northwest;

-- the Champlain-Hudson Trade Corridor and Gateway Coalition representing trade from Quebec City and Montreal to New York; and

-- the I-95 Corridor Coalition alliance of transportation agencies, toll authorities, and related organizations (including law enforcement) from Canada to Florida in support of transportation managements and operational common interest issues favoring business.

Nothing so far is finalized, but SuperCorrider momentum remains viable. It's slowed in Texas, but very much alive and viable.

In contrast, opposition groups are numerous, vocal, but yet to achieve enough critical mass to matter. They include groups like the "People's Summit" that protested in New Orleans last April against the recent three-presidential secret summit to plot strategy. Also, the conservative Coalition to Block the North American Union condemns a "stealth plan" to erase national borders, merge three nations into one, end the sovereignty of each, build a SuperCorridor, put Washington and the military in charge, allow unlimited immigration, and replace the dollar with the "amero."

Still another is a group of citizen-activist Oklahomans and the organization they formed: Oklahomans for Sovereignty and Free Enterprise. Like similar Texas and other state groups, it's against the SuperCorridor and its proposed I-35 route through their state. It's a conservative group believing that "a capitalist economy can regulate itself in a freely competitive market...with a minimum of governmental intervention and regulation." It opposes government using the law to facilitate a "corporate takeover" of society and fund it with public tax dollars. On board as well is an Oklahoma state senator who says "the NAFTA Superhighway stops here."

He'll need other lawmakers with him and on April 29 failed. Despite vocal opposition, the Oklahoma state legislature authorized the creation of "Smart (inland) Ports" and SuperCorridor system despite earlier having passed a resolution urging Congress "to withdraw from the (SPP - North American Union)" and all activities related to it. Besides Oklahoma, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) lists 21 other states that have passed public-private partnership enabling legislation considered essential for private investment to go forward.

At the federal level, there's also congressional opposition (but not enough to matter) in spite of Rep. Virgil Goode and six co-sponsors introducing House Concurrent Resolution 40 in January 2007. It expressed "the sense of (some but not enough in) Congress that the United States should not engage in (building a NAFTA) Superhighway System or enter into a North American Union with Mexico and Canada."

State legislatures as well are against it (in contrast to others in support) - thus far a dozen or more passing resolutions in 2008 and another 20 in 2007. Well and good but remember Adlai Stevenson's response to an enthusiastic supporter during his first presidential campaign. He thanked the woman and replied: "That's not enough madam. I need a majority."

It's no different for the SuperCorridor and North American Union. They're progressing secretly in spite of activist opposition and a largely unaware public. A recent poll sheds light. It was conducted by the American Policy Center that calls itself "a privately funded, nonprofit, 501 c (4), tax-exempt grassroots action and education foundation dedicated to the promotion of free enterprise and limited government...."

It revealed no widespread public SPP opposition because most people (58% living along the proposed Texas to Minnesota route) don't know about it or enough to matter. However, 95% of respondents with awareness opposed it but unfortunately in answer to biased questions. Their wording apparently conveyed the idea of "private corporations (having) power to enforce trade policy that may adversely affect our national sovereignty and independence."

Market researchers know that questions must be neutral and unbiased to produce reliable results. For example, respondents should have been asked: From what you know about SPP, do you favor or oppose it? A follow-up should then ask "why" to get unguided replies. Other biased questions were also asked and elicited strong opposition to an "amero," NAFTA courts superseding state and federal ones, the Bush administration being allowed to proceed without congressional approval, the US being "harmonized" or merged with Mexico and Canada, and more.

Most important is that public knowledge is sparse. What is known is incomplete, at times inaccurate, and either way plans (so far) are proceeding with or without congressional or public approval.

It means a corporate coup d'etat is advancing, aided and abetted by three governments. They plan to unite and become one, militarize the continent for enforcement, lay ribbons of concrete and rail lines across it, and hand it over to business for profit. That's where things now stand. Imagine where they'll end if a way isn't found to stop them.

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen [at] sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to the Global Research News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Mondays from 11AM - 1PM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9383

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with Canada?

2008-03-15T04:46:00.000-07:00

Does the public become incensed about the destruction of Canadian sovereignty advocated in the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) that would create a North American Union of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico (the NAU), and the use of a common currency named the Amero? Signed by then Prime Minister Paul Martin in Waco, Texas in March of 2005, followed by further semi-secret meetings in Banff, Alta, in 2006, in Montebello, Quebec in Aug of 2007, and New Orleans in April of 2008. This group discuss and decide policy on water rights in Canada, counter-drug dealings in Mexico, transportation, migration, environment, health, to name only a few subject matters. All this with nil congressional or parliamentary oversight, authorization or discussion in any of the three countries involved.
Hockey Night in Canada

Does this anti-democratic effort to amalgamate Canada, the U.S. and Mexico get much attention from the Canadian electorate? Not at all, most will tell you they never even heard of it. No debate in Parliament, you say? Where do you come up with bullshine like that? Never heard of such cowabunga; you have to be puttin’ me on sir; and why should I give a continental damn in any case. There’s nothing I can do about it.

Do the majority of Canadians care that we form part of an immoral and illegal attack force in Afghanistan and the Middle East, where our erstwhile peacekeepers are fighting to force an energy corridor through that country for the benefit of ‘big oil’. The answer seems to be that the Canadian majority could care less.. Anyway, we have to support our troops, right or wrong, don’t we, and build up an army to help prevent Iran from having the same nuclear power enjoyed by Canada, Israel and the United States. Maybe we should join the U.S. and Israel, who already have the bomb, and consider helping them invade Iran, starting with the delivery of a little pre-emptive nuclear message first, just in case they have the temerity to refuse to sell us their oil in petrodollars or nationalize the industry

Do the majority of the Canadian public give a rat’s ass that the ‘War on Drugs’ and the ‘War on the Noun of Terror’ are both farcical corrupt scams? That 9/11, 2001, was a covert false flag operation conducted by rogue elements of the CIA and the US government, in which the World Trade Center twin towers and Building 7 were demolished by controlled demolition?

The National threat from within

2008-01-29T05:17:00.000-08:00

National threat comes from within

President Lincoln, in the early years of his administration, gave this speech which was prompted by a burning in St. Louis by a mob a few weeks before. It shows his concern about a conspiracy that could destroy our nation from within. His speech included the following paragraph.

'At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reaches us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.'

Mitt Romney, in his closing speech, said that our nation is under a threat and that threat is from within. He was probably referring to the plan to form The North American Union by the Bush Administration.

Ron Paul, during one of the early presidential debates said, in response to a query by a caller, that the Council on Foreign Relations is planning a merger of the U.S. with Mexico and Canada.

The above comment confirms that there is a plan being developed for this merger, and members of the North American Competitiveness Council (NACC) consisting of government officials and corporate CEO’s from the three countries are currently writing the details to institutionalize the Security and Prosperity Partnership, a document previously signed by leaders of the three nations on March 23, 2005. All of this without oversight by the congress.

This needs to be opposed. For more information on this, use the Internet by searching and downloading: Council on Foreign Relations, Security and Prosperity Partnership, North American Community, North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and NACC.

What is being written by the NACC is not known but some details have been reported:

The borders between the US, Mexico and Canada will be open with no inspections by 2010. The court system will have no appeal. Decisions of the jury and/or judges will be final. Innocent until proven guilty will be scrapped.

The dollar will be replaced by the 'amero' following the example in Europe when their money was replaced by the euro. What assurance do you have when your exchange is made at the bank that you will have the same purchasing power? The Germans received one euro for every 1.96 marks, having the effect of drastically increased prices.

If you want to be a part of the solution, there are several things you can do. (1) Ask your congressman to support H. Con. Res. 22 to block the NAU by repealing NAFTA, (2) support H. Con. Res. 40 to stop The North American Union, (3) order materials about the betrayal of the NAU and then tell others. I am convinced this can be defeated by an overwhelming opposition. We owe it to ourselves and our Founding Fathers to save our Nation.

Earl W. Hurty

CommieNews on YouTube

2007-12-29T16:27:00.000-08:00

Please go by YouTube and check out the CommieNews videos.

NAU-NAFTA Superhighway agenda: Manitoba Premier Gary Doer exposes NDP leader Jack Layton's campaign of mass-deception

2007-12-09T16:40:00.000-08:00

by Bill Lavigne

NDP Premier Gary Doer [Left] and NDP leader Jack Layton [Right] are demonstrating themselves to be politically invasive “fifth column” collaborators of a U.S. military expansionist agenda into Canada.

The federal NDP advertises on its website that it is against the Security and Prosperity Partnership North American Union (SPP-NAU) agenda. However, it appears that the NDP merely advertises such opposition to placate and deceive its activist supporters, while Mr. Layton and his political party elite colleagues substantively capitulate.

Indeed, in spite of the alleged opposition of the NDP to the SPP-NAU agenda, Manitoba's NDP Premier Gary Doer, in his government's Throne Speech 20 November 2007, endorsed the so-called "Mid Continental Corridor" North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Superhighway.

While Mr. Harper professes to stand for "integrity in government", the Stephen Harper government has officially denied the existence of any such "NAFTA Superhighway" project, in the face of ample proof that it does exist.

Rest assured, Mr. Doer as an NDP Premier, within the constitutional modus operandi of the NDP, would not have provided that SPP-related endorsement, without having consultation and agreement with Jack Layton, his federal party leader. That type of high level "executive-political" non-consultation is not how the NDP works.

Victor Fletcher, the editor of Toronto Street News, regales us with a story about NDP leader Jack Layton: "I met Jack Layton two Saturdays ago and asked him why the NDP was supporting the NAFTA highway in the NDP Manitoba Throne Speech. He said "Manitoba needs the Churchill jobs." I agreed but further asked: "Why then, do they have to issue Mexican drivers licenses for fall of 2008?" He then RAN AWAY!"

"He took off with his aide and never answered after taking a copy of Toronto Street News which a headline I pointed to saying: “Harper's Police State Union With Bush Moving Fast! Manitoba Throne Speech Announces U.S. Union!"

This is not the action of someone who is substantively against the SPP-NAU agenda. Mr. Layton as a "Quisling"-like collaborator, along with Mr. Dion and the Bloc Quebecois leader have indeed turned Opposition Party politics in Canada into facile political theatre aimed at deceiving Canadians.

The Norwegian Prime Minister Vidkun Quisling co-operated with Adolf Hitler to deliver that country to the Nazis; and these Canadians are similarly cooperating to deliver Canada to Neo-Nazi military expansionist interests. Indeed, both former German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler, and the U.S. Bush administration embrace disturbingly similar pre-emptive military strike foreign policy and national security legitimated doctrines.

The NDP grassroots in particular, are being lulled into a stupor that 'Jack' is out fighting against the SPP, while his operatives like Gary Doer betray the apparent true allegiances of NDP political party elites.

Victor Fletcher also states: "Jack Layton is an old customer of mine from the late 1970's when he ran for municipal politics and I ran a union typesetting company designing election literature and arranging union printing for customers." Therefore, Mr. Fletcher provides his comments as someone who has been very supportive of Mr. Layton and the NDP.

Mr. Fletcher as elaborates that: "I was a supporter of his [Mr. Layton] over the years and he did help us with the Toronto Street News sold by the homeless. So I have known Jack for many years and he was the only politician who ever wrote a book about the homeless situation."

"I was deeply saddened when he confirmed the NDP government of Doer and their Throne Speech also confirmed the NAFTA highway was coming from Mexico to deliver exploited Mexican labour to Canada as well as Chinese goods."

The NAU-NAFTA Superhighway is an apparent scheme designed to faciliate the bringing into Manitoba (and other parts of Canada) exploited Mexican slave labour; and bringing out of Canadian resources. Map reference: LINK

Indeed, the so-called NAFTA Superhighway, is an agenda of Big Business interests, that have sought to use the secretive arrangement of the SPP-NAU created by elites, to import slave labour from Mexico and goods created from the slave labour of Communist China.

In the view of Big Business NAFTA Superhighway backers, why should corporations move to Mexico and build new factories to employ cheap Mexican labour, when you can bring cheap Mexican labour into the U.S. and Canada through a NAFTA Superhighway corridor? Imagine cheap Mexican and other exploited labour being brought to work in existing manufacturing plants into Canadian cities like Winnipeg, Vancouver, Hamilton, and Toronto, where these Mexicans (and other exploited labour) would be paid the same wage as if they were still in Mexico, Communist China, India or a "Third World" country.

An integral part of the NAU agenda is to replace existing Canadian and U.S. immigration law, with edicts that have been secretly created by Big Business interests, and that can move cheap labour, like livestock, around North America, along a elite constructed Continental Highway and Inland Port System.

Drivers Licenses in the context of the NAFTA Superhighway Agenda

NAFTA map corridor.

The Security and Prosperity Partnership hologram logo in the shape of the North American Continent has began to appear on new driver's licenses being issued in the State of North Carolina.

The issuing of such licenses in North America is apparently being executed under the terms of the Driver's License Agreement (DLA), launched under the auspices American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA).

The National Conferences of State Legislatures in the United States documents in a report issued in March 2005 that "the new DLA was developed largely without input from state elected officials." LINK. The DLA is the institutional creature of an anti-democratic and exploitative agenda.

The DLA indeed envisions the creation of one common license across North America inclusive of Mexico, in relation to the broad SPP-NAU agenda.

Indeed, the apparent NAU agenda of the DLA defines "jurisdiction" to, “allow participation by a territory or province of Canada and by any state of the Republic of Mexico or the Federal District of Mexico.” LINK.

Under the pretext of new national security features, in defence against the "terrorists", the DLA operatives of the SPP are seeking to convince Canadians and Americans of the need to accept new licenses. However, that is an apparent mass-deception. The new licenses appear to be actually about furthering a calculated malevolent continental corporate agenda.

William Gheen, who heads the Raleigh, N.C.-based Americans for Legal Immigration political action committee, says the new license is “‘North American Union' ready.”

The online publication New Max reported on 6 September 2007 that, "The hologram is a foil-based security patch that carries design features both visible and invisible to the human eye, including a variety of codes, numbers, and 3-D and fluorescent images."

The apparent agenda of these licenses is to enable exploited Mexican labour who are issued North American licenses, to be able to freely drive into U.S. and Canadian industrial centres, as a parallel pool of cheap labour, that can be paid by employers as if they were still in Mexico. Mexicans would be presumably housed in prison like labour camps, as an industrial reserve army for the rich corporate elites that seek to replace democracy in Canada and the United States with their own "NAU continental authority".

The Industrial interests that back that NAFTA Superhighway are anti-union, and seek the NAFTA Superhighway as a means to take labour rights back to an elite idealized time during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, when workers lived in abject poverty, at the sufferance of their employers.

Indeed, the whole apparent goal of the U.S. Bush administration's interest in amnesty for illegal Mexican immigrants in the United States was not out of compassion or a conviction for human rights. Rather, the U.S. Bush administration appears to have simply sought to enable corporations to be able to more openly hire exploited Mexican workers, without union support, on wages that are below the poverty line.

NAFTA Superhighway promises masses job losses for Canadians and Americans, alongside growing urban poverty

The NAFTA Superhighway promises to create massive new layoffs of higher paid Canadian workers in Canada, and American workers in the U.S., and the overall spread of worsening urban poverty and crime, as a result of these massive lay-offs, and the influx of exploited migrant labour.

The NAFTA Superhighway agenda is being hidden away from Canadians, (as well as Americans) because less than 1% of Canadians and Americans (i.e. elite corporate shareholders and owners of capital) is expected to commercially benefit from it.

It is apparent that the NAFTA Superhighway that in turn is linked to the DLA architects "one license under one continent" mantra , that in turn is linked to the overall SPP-NAU agenda, is part of the New World Order (NWO) agenda, that seeks to "unify" the world under a neo-fascist elite. Through new licenses and other such sophisticated biometric and other such "security measures", in the name of "fighting terrorism", elites seek to rule our planet Earth via totalitarian control.

The NWO envisions a planet Earth, where people cannot rely on local democratic control to defend their human rights.

The NAFTA Superhighway or Mid-Continental Corridor in reference to Mr. Layton's comments, is not designed to provide good paying jobs to the people of Churchill, or other parts of Canada. Rather, the NAFTA Superhighway is intended to simplify continental land routes, and accordingly, ease the ability of Mexicans, and other exploited labour to be transported into Churchill, and other parts of Canada, at the will of elites, within a neo-fascistic NAU.

As Mr. Fletcher expresses: "I hadn't expected the NDP of all parties to be the ones to let the cat out of the bag for all Canadians to see, after he had previously indicated the NDP would fight the union of Canada, U.S. and Mexico."

"We all know that the CPR bought a railway south of the Great Lakes which has a spur line down to Kansas City where the NAFTA Superhighway will allow Mexican truck drivers to reach quickly," adds Mr. Fletcher

"The CNR is doing similar work on Canada's west coast reaching south into Washington State."

"Yes, I button-holed him at the Bali demonstration at Yonge and Dundas. His aide took the current issue of the paper calling Harper a traitor for lying about the NAFTA highway and NAU. But they left me standing there when I asked the question," further says Mr. Fletcher.

The NAFTA Superhighway is being built around a broader scheme to transfer Canada's control of its own resources, to U.S. and Canadian-based Big Business interests, in the context of the neo-fascistic NAU agenda.

The U.S. political-military-industrial complex having depleted America's resources through greed-driven exploitation, seeks to create a NAFTA Superhighway specifically, and the NAU. in general, in order to facilitate the siphoning and depletion of our resources, here in Canada.

Canadians must either rally to cancel NAFTA that spawned the SPP-NAU agenda, or face a future in which they will have little more rights that sheep in a farm, with a quality-of-life that may not be that much better.

THE NORTH AMERICAN UNION AND THE LARGER PLAN

2007-11-16T16:38:00.000-08:00

By Dennis L. Cuddy, Ph.D.
November 17, 2007
NewsWithViews.com

In order to bring about a North American Union (NAU), the public first has to be conditioned to think of themselves as North Americans. In that regard, Thomas Donohue (president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) on June 16, 2006 remarked that "for CEOs, North America is already a single market, and business decisions are no longer made with a Mexico strategy---or a Canada strategy---but, rather, with a North American strategy....I think it's pretty clear now that it no longer makes sense to talk about U.S. competitiveness and Mexican competitiveness---or, for that matter, about the competitiveness of Canada. We are all in this together---we, as North Americans."

Also relevant to this process is the publication of NORTH AMERICAN INTEGRATION MONITOR since 2002 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Very soon, CSIS also will publish (and has agreed to send me) their final document on their "North American Future 2025 Project." The Project has "an emphasis on regional integration," and the year 2025 A.D. was selected "on the basis of the data presently available on overall global projections." Seven closed-door roundtable sessions have been looking at the methodology of global and North American projections, as well as labor mobility, energy, the environment, security, competitiveness, and border infrastructure and logistics.

Zbigniew Brzezinski has been a CSIS counselor, and at Mikhail Gorbachev's first State of the World Forum in 1995, Brzezinski revealed: "We cannot leap into world government through one quick step....The precondition for eventual and genuine globalization is progressive regionalization because by that we move toward larger, more stable, more cooperative units." This is why the CSIS Project has "an emphasis on regional integration." (Brzezinski also described the regions that would be formed, that Israel and the Palestinians would be part of a Middle Eastern region, how Communist China would be brought into an Asian region, and that Iran would be part of a Central Asian region which would have important oil and gas pipelines constructed.)

At this point, it is worth remembering that in Stalin's January 1913 address in Vienna, he advocated national loyalties becoming subservient to regions. And 3 years later, Lenin in 1916 proclaimed: "The aim of socialism is not only to abolish the present division of mankind into smaller states and all-national isolation, not only to bring the nations closer to each other, but also to merge them."

You may recall that in Brzezinski's BETWEEN TWO AGES (1970), he praised Marxism, and he claimed that "the nation-state is gradually yielding its sovereignty." One aspect of American sovereignty that is being yielded is ownership of American companies by Americans. In the first 9 months of 2007, 69 companies in New England alone have been sold to foreign buyers. Nationally, the French company Alcatel bought Lucent Technologies in the U.S. last year, and in September 2007 announced it will be cutting thousands of jobs.

Relevant to this, Alan Tonelson (research fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Council) said foreign companies are "acquiring control over the most dynamic pieces of the American economy, and they're acquiring control over America's future." Also relevant to this was the assessment by Donald Klepper-Smith (chief economist at DataCore Partners) regarding decisions made overseas and how they would effect American workers. He opined: "It raises some red flags and some real questions about our independence."

Part of the conditioning process to cause Americans to accept a NAU is the role of past and present government officials explaining the alleged economic benefits of such a union. For example, Harry Roegner in a letter titled "An economic union would be beneficial" in THE GREENVILLE (South Carolina) SUN (October 15, 2007) pointed out the large oil reserves of both Canada and Mexico that would be useful to the U.S., as well as Mexico's excess manpower who, as immigrants, would help support U.S. and Canadian economic growth. Roegner was an adviser on foreign trade issues to the U.S. Department of Commerce from 1984 to 1994, and in his letter said: "A North American economic union would provide the free flow of capital and labor across national borders needed to address many of the (aforementioned) imbalances."

Often regional economic integration into some type of union is argued on the basis of free trade. However, John Fonte (who had an office next to mine at the U.S. Department of Education) of the Hudson Institute has explained that the concept of regional economic arrangements or trading blocs actually is contrary to free trade to an extent. For example, in a NAU, there would be trading arrangements among the 3 nations which would limit the ability of the U.S. to trade freely with nations outside the NAU trading bloc.

But hasn't President Bush recently said all this talk about a NAU is nonsense? On August 21, 2007 at the concluding press conference for the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) in Montebello, Quebec, Fox News reporter Bret Baier asked if the SPP is a prelude to a NAU similar to the European Union (EU), and if there are plans to build some kind of superhighway connecting all 3 countries. President Bush replied: "If you've been in politics as long as I have, you get used to that kind of technique where you lay out a conspiracy and then force people to try to prove it doesn't exist."

The truth, of course, is that the U.S., Canada and Mexico are being connected by 4 Trade Corridors. On November 20, 2007, Lt. Governor John Harvard of Manitoba delivered a "Speech From The Throne," in which he revealed: "Manitoba has been working with the Canadian government and state governments in the U.S. to protect and enhance our access to key trade markets. In response to U.S. border and security measures, Manitoba will begin offering an enhanced driver's license as an affordable and secure form of identification for travelers. The new license will be available in the Fall of 2008. Manitoba is also taking a major role in the development of a Mid-Continent Trade Corridor, connecting our northern Port of Churchill with trade markets throughout the central United States and Mexico. To advance the concept, an alliance has been built with business leaders and state and city governments spanning the entire length of the Corridor. When fully developed, the trade route will incorporate an 'in-land port' in Winnipeg with pre-clearance for international shipping."

The SPP is also an important part of the power elite's plan for a techno-feudal fascist world government because it is a "partnership." For years, the American people and their leaders have been conditioned to accept educational and other partnerships as solutions to their problems. For example, city governments strapped for funds are approached by corporations or their related private foundations with plans and funds to improve education, which the city leaders are only too glad to accept. This conditions the people eventually to accept government/corporate rule. This is a form of Socialism known as fascism, and it will be the type of world government the power elite plans ultimately to bring about and control. In this government, the power elite will control politicians who will become government leaders who will promulgate laws, rules and regulations favorable to certain transnational corporations (controlled by the power elite) and unfavorable to any possible competition to those select corporations.

So why did President Bush ridicule Bret Baier's question, especially since there are already 47 Mexican Consulates across the U.S.? Lou Dobbs in his CNN commentary "Beware the Lame Duck" (October 17, 2007) wrote: "Although many conservatives refuse to accept the reality, George W. Bush is a one-world neo-liberal who drove budget and trade deficits to record heights....President Bush has pressed hard for the Security and Prosperity Partnership, the first step toward a North American Union that will threaten our sovereignty. The administration has permitted American businesses to hire illegal aliens, encouraged the invasion of 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens and has given Mexico and corporate America dominion over our borders and our immigration policy....The assault on our national sovereignty continues....The president is urging the Senate to act favorably on our accession to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea....The treaty will submit the United States to international tribunals largely adverse to our interests, and dispute resolution mechanisms are stacked against the United States....The treaty would undermine our national sovereignty and act as a back door for global environmental activists to direct U.S. policy." Fortunately, in Congress, House Concurrent Resolution 40 states: "Expressing the sense of Congress that the United States should not engage in the construction of a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Superhighway System or enter into a North American Union with Mexico and Canada."

If I could have followed up Bret Baier's question with one of my own, here's what I would have asked: "So, President Bush, will the massive 10-lane toll road TransTexas Corridor funded by Cintra of Spain and to be built by Zachry Construction of Texas come to a screeching halt at Oklahoma's border?" What are all the vehicles supposed to do---merge all of a sudden into a small road? I don't think so ! And by the way, Cintra is legally represented in Texas by leading Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani's law firm Bracewell & Giuliani, which also just happens to have an office in Dubai (remember Dubai Ports was about to take over operation of a number of America's largest ports) ! Perhaps before President Bush was too critical of people warning about a NAU, he should have read what Mexico's President Vicente Fox said May 16, 2002 at Club 21 in Madrid: "Eventually, our long-range objective is to establish with the United States, but also with Canada, our other regional partner, an ensemble of connections and institutions similar to those created by the European Union" (or as Gorbachev refers to the EU, the "European Soviet").

I would also have asked President Bush at the press conference why on September 6, 2007 at 9pm did he open all U.S. highways to Mexican trucks? Earlier in the day, U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio said President Bush was "_ _ _ _ bent" on getting Mexican trucks in the U.S. by stealth. Currently, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration website lists 10 Mexican carriers that are approved to transport goods throughout the U.S., and nearly 40 more Mexican carriers will soon join them on the list.

Will all Mexican truck drivers be stopped at the border to see if they can read road signs in English, if they have criminal backgrounds, and how long they already have been driving that day (U.S. law prohibits more than 10 consecutive hours)? I doubt it, since no more than 2% of Mexican trucks entering the U.S. today are inspected ! Many of these trucks will be a danger to Americans' safety, and could be used for smuggling drugs, illegal aliens, and terrorists into the U.S.

Many countries deliberately release their criminal elements into the U.S., often coming across the Mexican border. And if the criminals are caught, our federal government releases them into American society if their own countries refuse to take them back. Our government knows how to solve this problem (e.g., stop issuing visas to people from those countries), but has refused to take such action most of the time. Ask yourself why our government would release murderers, rapists, arsonists, and other criminals into our society to commit violent crimes against us. Think about it !

Returning to Bret Baier's question to President Bush about the SPP being a prelude to a NAU similar to the EU, what would we get if we became like the EU, which has certain characteristics of fascism? Mrs. Kitty Werthmann (a survivor of Hitler's reign and Soviet rule afterward) recently returned to Europe and interviewed many senior citizens. They informed her they were told conversion to the Euro would bring prosperity via free trade, lower prices for goods, etc. In reality, though, their money was devalued greatly, and they're now living on welfare and food stamps. Unemployment in Europe is high while guest workers are brought in, and the people are angry.

In terms of what is planned for Americans relevant to the EU and the Euro, Vicente Fox on CNN's "Larry King Live" show October 8, 2007 explained that what he and President Bush agreed to "is a trade union for all the Americas," and he suggested that eventually there would be a regional currency. He made similar comments on the "Daily Show" the same day. Earlier in 2007, Bolivian President Evo Morales proposed a single currency for all South American nations.

Concerning North American nations, in June 1991, Dallas Federal Reserve publication no. 9115, "Free Trade and the Peso" by Darryl McLeod and John Welch, analyzed the potential for a single North American currency. In 1999, former Canadian parliament member Herbert Grubel published "The Case for the Amero: The Economics and Politics of a North American Union," giving 2010 as the possible date for introducing the "amero" as the new North American currency. And in the Atlanta Federal Reserve's ECONOMIC REVIEW (4th quarter, 2000), Michael Chriszt (director of the Reserve's Latin America Research Group) wrote "Perspectives on a Potential North American Monetary Union" in which one reads that "the idea of a single currency for NAFTA is on the table." In July 2000, Vicente Fox had already proposed a North American common market with a continental monetary policy.

More recently, David Dodge, Governor of the Bank of Canada, in May 2007 said that a common currency with the U.S. is definitely possible. What will happen is the power elite will cause the dollar to be devalued to the point where Americans reluctantly will accept the amero. As Bob Chapman in his December 2006 newsletter, INTERNATIONAL FORECASTER, said: "(The amero) will be presented to the American public as the administration's solution for dollar recovery."

On June 14, 2007 BankIntroductions.com told their clients that in the next 10-20 years, as the global economy moves toward regional trading blocs, the amero or "North American Monetary Unit" (NAMU) will be introduced. The power elite's plan is to form regional unions with their own currencies and then link them into a world government with one global currency. Relevant to this, Reuters reporter Emmanuel Jarry on October 23, 2007 wrote "Sarkozy (French President) Calls for Mediterranean Union Launch in 2008." And the African Union's African Central Bank plans to mint the "Gold Mandela" as a single African currency by 2010 (the date the NAU is supposed to form).

If you look at the top of the website for the Single Global Currency Association (SGCA), there is a quote by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, saying: "A global economy requires a global currency." The SGCA "is dedicated to the goal of implementing a single global currency by 2025...managed by a single international central bank." I have already indicated that on the cover of THE ECONOMIST (June 9, 1988) is a picture of "The Phoenix," a global currency suggested for implementation in 2018.

Whatever the date of the global currency's introduction, it will be advertised as facilitating world trade, which the power elite will control. This will be like in the days of Solomon when he fortified Gezer, Hazor and Megiddo (the Har, or Mount, of Megiddo would be called Armageddon). Through this fortification, he controlled the Via Maris and world trade, thereby controlling the world of his day. The power elite today plans to do likewise, but in a Biblical sense their plan will lead to the Battle of Armageddon.

Dept of Justice Against Net Neutrality

2007-09-08T10:38:00.000-07:00

Within the last few days, he Department of Justice has recommended that the FCC come out against Net Neutrality, in favor of allowing the owners of infrastructure to charge people who write online to allow content to pass to readers and viewers.

The move could potentially give a handful of companies more control over Net-based information than they currently have over radio and television programming.

DOJ Slams Net Neutrality (Article in PC Mag Online).

5 Day Martial Law Exercise

2007-09-07T12:55:00.000-07:00

ntel Strike | September 7, 2007
Lee Rogers

The United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) has just announced plans for an anti-terrorism exercise called Vigilant Shield 08 . The exercise which is slated to run from October 15th to October 20th is described as a way to prepare, prevent and respond to any number of national crises. The exercise is simply a test case scenario for the implementation of martial law. Although the description of the exercise is disturbing, USNORTHCOM also announced that they are more prepared for a natural disaster and a terrorist attack after they used their response to Hurricane Katrina as a test laboratory. During Hurricane Katrina, authorities violated the constitutional rights of citizens by stealing people?s firearms and even relocating people against their will. These announcements are incredibly disturbing on a number of levels as the nature of Vigilant Shield 08 and the admission that Hurricane Katrina was used as a test laboratory shows that the government is actively preparing the military and government institutions for martial law.

Below is the full press release from USNORTHCOM describing Vigilant Shield 08. Also check out the Vigilant Shield 08 fact sheet by clicking here .

North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command along with U.S. Pacific Command, the Department of Homeland Security as well as local, state and other federal responders will exercise their response abilities against a variety of potential threats during Exercise Vigilant Shield ?08, a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff-designated, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM)-sponsored, and U.S. Joint Forces Command-supported Department of Defense exercise for homeland defense and defense support of civil authorities missions.

VS-08 will be conducted concurrent with Top Officials 4 (TOPOFF 4), the nation?s premier exercise of terrorism preparedness sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security, and several other linked exercises as part of the National Level Exercise 1-08. These linked exercises will take place Ocober 15-20 and are being conducted throughout the United States and in conjunction with several partner nations including Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, as well as the Territory of Guam.

VS-08 and National Level Exercise 1-08 will provide local, state, tribal, interagency, Department of Defense, and non-governmental organizations and agencies involved in homeland security and homeland defense the opportunity to participate in a full range of exercise scenarios that will better prepare participants to prevent and respond to national crises. The participating organizations will conduct a multi-layered, civilian-led response to a national crisis.

USNORTHCOM?s primary exercise venues for VS-08 include locations in Oregon, Arizona and a cooperative venue with USPACOM in the Territory of Guam. NORAD?s aerospace detection and defense events will take place across all the exercise venues, to exercise the ability to mobilize resources for aerospace defense, aerospace control, maritime warning, and coordination of air operations in a disaster area.

This exercise is clearly a way to prepare government to respond to a national crisis with martial law. This announcement also follows a number of other news stories that indicate the government is becoming more actively prepared for the implementation of martial law.

These stories include the following:

George W. Bush issuing a presidential directive declaring that he is a dictator during the case of a national emergency be it a natural disaster, a terror attack or any number of crises.

KSLA reporting that members of clergy will be used to convince people to submit to government in the case of declare martial law.

The U.S. Department of Treasury conducting a disaster drill to prepare for a potential economic crisis.

In addition to the announcement of Vigilant Shield 08, USNORTHCOM also announced that they have been using the lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina to better respond to crises. The response to Hurricane Katrina was essentially used as a test laboratory to implement martial law in a city. People were forced to relocate against their will and authorities stole people?s firearms in the name of safety despite these actions being entirely unconstitutional.

From USNORTHCOM :

?Hurricane Katrina?s impact on this country was unprecedented. There are still many of our fellow Americans whose lives still haven?t returned to normal,? said Gen. Gene Renuart, commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command and USNORTHCOM. ?It will take many years for the Gulf Coast to fully recover.

?The United States military was deeply involved in the response to the hurricane and subsequent flooding,? Renuart said. ?While our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines helped thousands of people, we also learned many lessons.?

According to Renuart, USNORTHCOM has been using the lessons learned from Katrina to modify plans to respond to both natural disasters and potential terrorist actions.

Northern Command also admits in the same article that they have pre-scripted mission assignments coordinated with FEMA to implement martial law under the pretext of disaster response.

From USNORTHCOM :

USNORTHCOM is ready to help federal, state and local officials to be prepared for a major hurricane and to be successful at conducting response operations, if necessary and requested by the primary responding agency. Some of the ways these objectives are being achieved are:

Through State Engagement programs, USNORTHCOM provides planning support to help states prepare for emergencies.

USNORTHCOM and its subordinates, as well as local, state and federal partners conduct major disaster exercises to refine processes and apply lessons learned.

Working with FEMA, USNORTHCOM has prepared pre-scripted mission assignments to accelerate the disaster response process.

USNORTHCOM conducted a major exercise with the National Guard in May to refine the interface between the National Guard and DoD.

There is no question that Vigilant Shield 08 is either government preparation for the implementation of martial law or a way for criminal elements within the government to distract emergency responders in order to conduct a false flag terror attack as a pretext to actually implement martial law and engage in foreign war. On September 11th, 2001 there were drills run by NORAD including Vigilant Guardian which served as a way to ensure that there was no adequate military response to the hi-jacked planes. A similar scenario unfolding with Vigilant Shield is not out of the question.

Sicko

2007-07-01T17:57:00.000-07:00

Once again, Michael Moore takes on big game. Sicko, his latest, has humor and poignancy as well as relevancy and Message.

Here in Orange County, California, several large theater chains refused to air Moore's previous works Bowling for Columbine and Farenheit 911, but Edwards has now picked it up.

Meanwhile, Moore's site Sickotix, at http://www.sickotix.com/ has a theater locator and options to buy.

Dead Donkeys Don't Kick

2007-05-29T22:11:00.000-07:00

Some Observations on the recent vote for war:

The demos have signed on to Bush's war when 20% of the population supported it.

Therefore, most congressmen and senators voted against their constituencies.

Since even centrist media have finally reported that the Bushies excused their invasions in a cascade of lies, one must assume professional politicians have long recognized that. So few if any of these votes can be tied to conscience over Iraqis.

The troops can be withdrawn at no cost to the troops with the money the government now has. Being in Baghdad is more dangerous than being in the US. So this bill kills troops; it does not protect them or support them. This is obvious enough that one must find it unlikely that anyone signed off on the war to support American troops.

Politicians and there immediate families rarely get involved in war. (The current ex-Vietnam politicians were at draft age in a time when the lottery draft did not respect economic differences, not in the current, more typical poverty-draft.) So the votes did not come from direct personal concerns (indirect concerns, including payola, may be another matter).

Republicans may have voted against their better judgment from party loyalties, but this would not apply to democrats.

Anyone could have voted out of some obscure ideological ideas. But if so, the ideas seem more thoroughly obscure than usual. The war violates liberty, may result in disorder within the US as well as outside of it, and will be vastly unprofitable to much of the elite as well as most all American citizens. Moreover, politicians engage in adjusting ideals to practical circumstance professionally, on a daily basis. The substitution of childish lies (WMD after inspectors had verified their nonexistence, regime replacement after Hussein offered to step down, terrorism when bin Ladin represents religious and political factions opposed to Hussein) for even the most arcane of ideological argument suggests that ideological cannot be a primary reason.

Bribery laws don't get enforced efficiently, but when they do, the results are costly for politicians, who could otherwise retire on comfortable albeit vastly reduced pensions.

Politicians who have no campaign funds get removed from office regardless of how they vote. One could even argue that politicians should kowtow to lobbyists simply because any who don't will have to leave the beltway with dispatch

We might conclude that the intersection of two groups will be an approximate list of those who bought the war:

Corporations who have given or will give funds to democrats who voted for war

Corporations who have profited or stand to profit greatly from the war. This includes not only contractors, but companies that sell oil that does not come from Iraq.

How to become a dictator in a democracy

2007-05-28T13:11:00.000-07:00

How to become a dictator in a democracy

Get ready for a "national emergency"

2007-05-28T12:42:00.000-07:00

By Kurt Nimmo

It is hardly surprising not a single corporate newspaper reported the death of the Constitution. Go to Google News and type in National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive and hit enter. Google returns ten paltry results, not one from the New York Times, the Washington Post, or related corporate media source. Google Trends rates the story as mild, that is to say it warrants nary a blip on the news radar screen. Of course, another death blow to the Constitution, already long on life support, is hardly news. Few understand we now live in a dictatorship, or maybe it should be called a decidership.

The Bush administration has released a directive called the National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive. The directive released on May 9th, 2007 has gone almost unnoticed by the mainstream and alternative media. This is understandable considering the huge Ron Paul and immigration news but this story is equally as huge. In this directive, Bush declares that in the event of a Catastrophic Emergency the President will be entrusted with leading the activities to ensure constitutional government. The language in this directive would in effect make the President a dictator in the case of such an emergency, writes Lee Rogers for Global Research. The language written in the directive is disturbing because it doesn't say that the President will work with the other branches of government equally to ensure a constitutional government is protected. It says clearly that there will be a cooperative effort among the three branches that will be coordinated by the President. If the President is coordinating these efforts it effectively puts him in charge of every branch. The language in the directive is entirely Orwellian in nature making it seem that it is a cooperative effort between all three branches but than it says that the President is in charge of the cooperative effort.

In short, Bush may now declare himself absolute ruler at any moment and Congress can like it or lump it. Naturally, this act of betrayal is of so little importance and consequence, the corporate media believes you are better served knowing Justin Timberlake is in love.

This directive on its face is unconstitutional because each branch of government the executive, legislative and judicial are supposed to be equal in power, Lee continues. By putting the President in charge of coordinating such an effort to ensure constitutional government over all three branches is effectively making the President a dictator allowing him to tell all branches of government what to do.

So much for the first three articles of the Constitution, designed to make sure there remains a separation of power between branches of government. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition, declared James Madison in the Federalist Papers. Madison, in his original draft of the Bill of Rights, included a proposed amendment that would make the separation of powers explicit, but this proposal was rejected, primarily because his fellow members of Congress thought the separation of powers principle was obvious in the Constitution. There was no way for them to read the future, or predict the wholesale selling and buying of Congress, a judiciary stacked with reactionary troglodytes from the Federalist Society, and a largely brain dead public apparently more interested in Britney Spears lip-sync concerts than preserving the Constitution, let alone comprehending it.

Bush, of course, takes his marching orders from higher up on the food chain, more specifically the World Economic Forum, the club of billionaires and transnational corporations that meet annually in Davos, Switzerland, where they plot our future. In January, the Forum, with numerous links to business networks, policy-makers and government, NGOs and think-tanks, at the behest of Merrill Lynch, Swiss Re and the Center for Risk Management and Decision Processes, and Wharton School, produced Global Risks 2007, a report containing various dire global risk scenarios, including a full-blown [influenza] pandemic, with one million deaths worldwide. Other possible global risk scenarios include international terrorism and climate change.

But what does all of this have to do with Bush and the National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive?

The Directive slipped out relatively unnoticed by the mainstream media, yet it has important and positive implications for the future resiliency of public sector operations in the United States, reports Continuity Central. The concepts of a National Continuity Coordinator and a centrally directed National Continuity Implementation Plan are to be welcomed in principle and are something which other countries should look seriously at emulating.

Earlier in the year the World Economic Forum called for such a position to be set up in every government in its 'Global Risks 2007' report. This championed the appointment of 'Country Risk Officers' who would provide a focal point in government for mitigating global risks across departments, learning from private-sector approaches and escaping a 'silo-based' approach. As for the position of National Continuity Coordinator, it went to Frances Fragos Townsend, chair of the Homeland Security Council, who reports to Bush, or rather the neocons and a scattering of neolibs who tell Dubya what to say and do every morning.

Townsend, as Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, by virtue of the National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive signed May 9, 2007, by President Bush, is also National Continuity Coordinator, notes SourceWatch. The National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive states: The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government. In order to advise and assist the President in that function, the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism (APHS/CT) is hereby designated as the National Continuity Coordinator. The National Continuity Coordinator, in coordination with the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (APNSA), without exercising directive authority, shall coordinate the development and implementation of continuity policy for executive departments and agencies. The Continuity Policy Coordination Committee (CPCC), chaired by a Senior Director from the Homeland Security Council staff, designated by the National Continuity Coordinator, shall be the main day-to-day forum for such policy coordination.

In essence, the globalist oligarchy, from on-high in Davos, through business networks, policy-makers NGOs and think-tanks, are driving policies designed to reduce the Constitution to an irrelevancy. Of course, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are but the last impediment to establishing a globalist soviet in the United States, soon to be merged into a North American Union, itself but a component of larger trading blocs carved out by the globalists.

Considering all of this, it makes perfect sense the corporate media ignored the rollout of the National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive, same as they ignore the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, even though the latter involves the direct participation of Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Naturally, any talk of conspiracy to sell out the nation and dismantle the Constitution and the Bill of Rights relegates one to the tinfoil hat brigade, for if such things are not reported upon or discussed at Fox News, they naturally fall in the province of kooky conspiracy theories.

Happy reading ~ National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive

Cheney in Baghdad

2007-05-11T02:37:00.000-07:00

Linguists tell us that the wonder of language involves its potential to accomplish infinite variation with finite means. But that has a frightening aspect when we see how many errors can be dropped into a single finite sentence.

To be fair, the core lie in the sentence belongs to Dick Cheney, not to John Burns, the author of the Times article. But Burns' drift down the river of Cheney's speech shows something about the object in what folks call objective journalism:

After a day of talks here with Iraq's fractious political leaders, Vice President Cheney said Wednesday that he detected a 'greater sense of urgency' among them in tackling a list of divisive issues that the Bush administration sees as the key to any sustained progress against the country's insurgent and militia groups."

(John Burns. 5/10/2007 A12 NY TIMES)

Where does one begin?

Iraq's fractious political leaders -- Being fractious, the leaders are resistant to authority. We mean that they're not being quick or efficient enough about obeying the Americans. So if George Bush is not an Iraqi leader, then the term must apply to the leaders of the resistance forces that fight the Americans. Yet the only Iraqi that Burns will mention as a leader is Al Maliki, whom Bush periodically threatens to fire.

On the other hand, fractious may call to mind fractions, fragments and factions: terms that one might take to refer to divisiveness. So maybe Mr. Burns waxes poetic. Perhaps he wishes to indicate that the Iraqi leaders don't agree with each other like leaders in, say, Washington.

greater sense of urgency -- Let's picture this. Five years into war, with over 600,000 Iraqis known dead and casualty rates still rising, utilities still out, water still fouled, rates of cancers and deformities rising with the background radiation from the depleted uranium arms, Cheney pops over for a little surprise visit to catch his Iraqi charges off-guard and see whether they're motivated to get down to work. Anyone else in a similar situation would be panicked or homicidal, but Cheney appears to consider his Iraqis a particularly unruffled bunch, more concerned about a vice-presidential frown than the grocery store exploding with half a city block of a Saturday.

It might be worth mentioning that while Burns mentions "divisive issues" many times throughout the article, there's no mention of what those issues might be. Did Cheney see fit to mention these, whereas Burns felt they didn't mention publication; or did Cheney not mention them at all, and Burns saw little reason to ask?

Either way, in this article, the speed at which the issues might be addressed was important; the issues themselves were not. This seems particularly interesting in that the article indicates throughout that the issues have not been addressed either quickly or slowly.

sustained progress against . . . insurgent and militia groups -- Which militias, which insurgents? Progress, and particularly sustained progress suggests forward movement, undebatable improvement. But what direction can be considered improvement here? Cheney says "against insurgent and militia groups," but since Iraqis want the Americans to leave, surely they must prefer the insurgents and the militias or someone of that nature, even if it's only a matter of voting for the lesser of two evils, like voting democrat in an American election. Leaving aside the claims for "democracy in Iraq" as rhetorical flourish, progress against "insurgents" can hardly mean anything other than progress against the Iraqis. Of course, given the nature of conflicts in general and the history of this conflict in particular, it's hard to see how even this can constitute something "sustained" or "progressive."

Have I erred in trying to read this as an objective statement? After all, if no one expects me to believe a statement, is it really a lie? But the article is not on an editorial page, not marked out visually in any way to distinguish it from other news articles that purport to be objective.

Reading speculatively, between the lines, I suspect that Burns wishes to give the impression that Mr. Cheney is off in Iraq watching after my money, that those Iraqis are mischievous lesser partners who much be watched after, who fritter away the company money getting shot and squabbling while hardworking Blackwater people caretake them with slowly diminishing patience.

"Ah, this is a fine mess you've gotten me into."

I suspect further that Cheney and perhaps Burns and the Times have an idea that Americans may be losing patience with them, that this latest love-letter must mean that it's all those Iraqis' fault, but that Cheney's working on it and that they're promising to come around. Of course, the Times has the right to promote any idea or fantasy they wish, should this be their intent. But it seems a pity to promote it with all signals of being a news article, especially when falsehoods emerge from the wording itself in ways that one suspects must have been obvious to the professional editors who reviewed it.

snoitisnartT: FALLOUTs!

2007-05-06T12:23:00.000-07:00

YOU MEET THE STRANGEST PEOPLE

DUST ANGELS: FALLOUTs!

2007-05-04T12:14:00.000-07:00

DEAR ANGEL OF DUST…?

The President's brother Neil is making hay from school reform

2007-05-04T12:07:00.000-07:00

Across the country, some teachers complain that President George W. Bush's makeover of public education promotes "teaching to the test." The President's younger brother Neil takes a different tack: He's selling to the test. The No Child Left Behind Act compels schools to prove students' mastery of certain facts by means of standardized exams. Pressure to perform has energized the $1.9 billion-a-year instructional software industry.

Now, after five years of development and backing by investors like Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and onetime junk-bond king Michael R. Milken, Neil Bush aims to roll his high-tech teacher's helpers into classrooms nationwide. He calls them "curriculum on wheels," or COWs. The $3,800 purple plug-and-play computer/projectors display lively videos and cartoons: the XYZ Affair of the late 1790s as operetta, the 1828 Tariff of Abominations as horror flick. The device plays songs that are supposed to aid the memorization of the 22 rivers of Texas or other facts that might crop up in state tests of "essential knowledge."

Bush's Ignite! Inc. has sold 1,700 COWs since 2005, mainly in Texas, where Bush lives and his brother was once governor. In August, Houston's school board authorized expenditures of up to $200,000 for COWs. The company expects 2006 revenue of $5 million. Says Bush about the impact of his name: "I'm not saying it hasn't opened any doors. It may have helped with some sales."

(In September, the U.S. Education Dept.'s inspector general accused the agency of improperly favoring at least five publishers, including The McGraw-Hill Companies, which owns BusinessWeek. A company spokesman says: "Our reading programs have been successful in advancing student achievement for decades; that's why educators hold them in such high regard.")

The stars haven't always aligned for Bush, but at times financial support has. A foundation linked to the controversial Reverend Sun Myung Moon has donated $1 million for a COWs research project in Washington (D.C.)-area schools. In 2004 a Shanghai chip company agreed to give Bush stock then valued at $2 million for showing up at board meetings. (Bush says he received one-fifth of the shares.) In 1988 a Colorado savings and loan failed while he served on its board, making him a prominent symbol of the S&L scandal. Neil calls himself "the most politically damaged of the [Bush] brothers."

While hardly the first brother to embarrass a President — remember Billy Carter's Billy Beer or Roger Clinton's cocaine? — Neil could be the first to seek profit from a hallmark Presidential crusade. And also that of a governor: Jeb makes school standards a centerpiece in Florida, too.

Neil says he never talks shop with his brothers. He attributes his interest in education to his struggles with dyslexia. His son, Pierce, also had difficulties in school, he says. "Not one of our investors has ever asked for any kind of special access — a visa, a trip to the Lincoln Bedroom, an autographed picture, or anything."

By STAFF, Business Week

More Moon Money Flows to Bush Family

2007-05-04T11:37:00.000-07:00

We are honored to welcome Larry Zilliox as a guest front pager. He is the president of Investigative Research Specialists, a private investigation company based in Bristow, Virginia. He has done extensive research on the Moon empire, following the money trail through public records and other sources. – FC

[image,right: George Bush Senior speaking at a 1996 Moon sponsored event]

As followers of Rev. Sun Myung Moon pray for a presidential pardon for their aging Messiah's felony tax-fraud conviction in the 1980s, the latest tax filing of the Washington Times Foundation has become available. The return covers the months from April 2005 through March 2006 and shows a $100,000 contribution from the foundation to the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy.

The Washington Times was founded by Moon and has been subsidized by Moon-controlled interests.

The only larger donation made by the foundation in that year was to another entity closely associated with Moon, the American Family Coalition, Inc. which received $219,000.

[image,right: still from video clip of George and Barbara Bush greeting Sun Myung Moon and his wife at a Moon event, backstage at the Tokyo Dome, 1995]

Funding for the Washington Times Foundation comes primarily from the mysterious International Peace Foundation (IPF). The source of the funds IPF donated to the Washington Times Foundation are not known and most likely are untraceable because IPF does not appear to be a legally incorporated entity. The IPF address listed in the Washington Times Foundation tax return is the Unification Movement-owned building at 7777 Leesburg Pike in Falls Church Virginia. A check of the Internal Revenue Service online directory of organizations recognized as exempt failed to find a listing for IPF. A check of GuideStar database of non-profit organizations also found no listing.

IPF was originally incorporated in the District of Columbia in 1988. A check of the District of Columbia online corporate registrations web page shows the status of IPF as "Revoked." District of Columbia corporate records identify Moon's long time right-hand man Bo Hi Pak as an original officer of the organization. Pak has a history of leading many Moon connected businesses and non-profit organizations in the Washington, DC area. One of the oldest organizations with which Pak is associated is the Korean Cultural Freedom Foundation. Pak, serving as Chairman, mismanaged the organization so badly it fell victim to one of the largest Nigerian Fraud Scams in US history. In 2001 and 2002 the Korean Cultural Freedom Foundation reported in it's IRS Form 990 tax return that it had lost nearly $3,000,000 to scammers.

In Virginia, where the Washington Times Foundation tax form lists IPF's current address, the Virginia State Corporation Commission records show the status for IPF as revoked in 2004. The Commission's online database of corporate registrations indicates the online record details for the entity have been purged from their system as of 12/31/2004.

This revelation of money donated to a charity associated with the Bush family is just the latest in a string of donations and payments dating back more than ten years. George H. W. Bush has had a long association with Moon going back to just after he left office. In September 1995 Bush and his wife gave a number of speeches in Asia for the Women's Federation for World Peace an organization headed by Moon's wife Hak Ja Han Moon. In November 1996 Bush spoke in Buenos Aires at a banquet honoring the opening of Moon's South American newspaper Tiempos del Mundo Bush refused to disclose how much he was paid for his Moon-sponsored speaking tour.

In 2003 the Washington Times Foundation funneled a $1,000,000 donation to the Bush Presidential Library through the Greater Houston Community Foundation. In 2005 the Moon sponsored Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace made a donation of $1,000,000, it's largest donation of the year, to the senior Bush's Points of Light Foundation for Hurricane Katrina relief.

The Bush 2005 Inaugural Committee received the maximum $250,000 donation from Moon's Washington Television Center the entity that owns the large office building at 650 Massachusetts Avenue in the District of Columbia. In December 2005 the President's younger brother, Neil, was spotted touring Taiwan and the Philippines with Moon. Less than a year later Business Week published an article titled "No Bush Left Behind" profiling Neil Bush's company Ignite!, Inc. The company sells a high tech teaching aid called "Curriculum on Wheels" or COWs. The article states "A foundation linked to the controversial Reverend Sun Myung Moon has donated $1 million for a COWs research project in Washington (D.C.)-area schools."

From non-profit tax returns and media reports we see that at least $3,335,000 has flowed from the Unification Movement to Bush family members or charities since George W. Bush has taken office.

By Larry Zilliox

MAYDAY: FALLOUTs!

2007-05-02T08:09:00.000-07:00

MAYDAY - MAYDAY - MAYDAY

Venezuela siezes big oil companies

2007-05-01T13:26:00.000-07:00

PUERTO PIRITU, Venezuela (Reuters) - Venezuela stripped the world's biggest oil companies of operational control over massive Orinoco Belt crude projects on Tuesday, a vital move in President Hugo Chavez's nationalization drive.

The May Day takeover came exactly a year after Bolivian President Evo Morales, a leftist ally of Chavez, startled investors by ordering troops to seize his country's gas fields, accelerating Latin America's struggle to reclaim resources.

"The importance of this is that we are taking back control of the Orinoco Belt which the president rightly calls the world's biggest crude reserve," said Marco Ojeda, an oil union leader before a planned rally to mark the transfer.

The four projects are valued at more than $30 billion and can convert about 600,000 barrels per day (bpd) of heavy, tarry crude into valuable synthetic oil.

U.S. companies ConocoPhillips, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Britain's BP, Norway's Statoil and France's Total agreed to obey a decree to transfer operational control on Tuesday, although the OPEC nation complained ConocoPhillips was somewhat resistant.

In Puerto Piritu, near the facilities that refine Orinoco crude, workers prepared early on Tuesday to celebrate the takeovers, displaying Venezuelan red, blue and yellow flags and daubing a wall with Chavez's slogan: "Homeland, Socialism or Death."

The anti-American leader was also in a festive mood before a rally marking what he called the end of an era of U.S.-prescribed policies that opened up the largest oil reserves in the hemisphere to foreign investment.

"Open investment will never return," he said on Monday to thousands of cheering workers dressed in the signature red of his self-styled leftist revolution at a rally for workers rights.

"We are sealing up that open investment era and burying it deep down in the Orinoco oil reserve," he added.

Buoyed by an oil price bonanza in the No. 5 crude exporter to the United States, Chavez is popular among the majority poor for spending freely on schools, clinics and food handouts.

The man who calls Cuban leader Fidel Castro his mentor has vowed to take at least 60 percent of the projects, radicalizing his policies as he rules by decree and politicizes the army, state oil company and judiciary.

TOUGH TALKS

In the oil projects, the companies have agreed to hand over operations but are still discussing continued shareholding and compensation in sometimes contentious negotiations before a deadline next month.

Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez has said there may not be compensation in some cases and that Venezuela will only consider agreements on the booked value of the projects rather than their much larger current net worth.

Although Venezuela claims output of more than 3 million bpd, analysts reckon it strains to pump 2.6 million bpd. U.S. data peg it as the world's No. 8 exporter.

Industry analysts fear Venezuela's state oil company PDVSA could ultimately run into production and safety problems when it loses the management and technology of the experienced majors.

As he shrinks the private companies' role, Chavez has formed joint ventures with allies such as China, Belarus and Iran involving many state entities that are unfamiliar with developing such crude.

Still, Chavez hailed Tuesday's takeovers as the South American nation reclaiming its sovereignty."The wheel has turned full circle," he said. "Long live PDVSA, long live the workers of PDVSA."

By Brian Ellsworth

***** This headline doesn't fit its piece.

Had Chavez seized the oil companies, as Castro did with major corporations in Cuba following their disagreement over government controls, executives would have little to do discussing compensation and benefits. The news here is not only that Chavez has indeed seized a controlling interest in the companies, but that this was done with substantial compromise.

Also, the figures on Venezuela's output and current sales do not properly convey its importance as an oil vendor. Many estimates place its reserves as the greatest in the world. Moreover, should the US decide to maintain reasonably good relations, Venezuelan reserves may be more reliable than Middle Eastern oil, being located far closer to the US and in a region that we have currently destabilized to a lesser degree.

The author doesn't state which experts worry how Venezuela will get the crude out of the ground, but one imagines they can pay for the service should they need to -- that is, unless the price of crude takes a very deep plunge.

And if it comes to further negotiations during Chavez' tenure, the oil companies might not get the sweetheart deal they've had in the past.

Venezuela Pulling Out of IMF, World Bank

2007-05-01T13:25:00.000-07:00

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - President Hugo Chavez announced Monday he would formally pull Venezuela out of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, a largely symbolic move because the nation has already paid off its debts to the lending institutions.

"We will no longer have to go to Washington nor to the IMF nor to the World Bank, not to anyone," said the leftist leader, who has long railed against the Washington-based lending institutions.

Chavez said he wanted to formalize Venezuela's exit from the two bodies "tonight and ask them to return what they owe us."

Venezuela recently repaid its debts to the World Bank five years ahead of schedule, saving $8 million. It paid off all its debts to the IMF shortly after Chavez first took office in 1999. The IMF closed its offices in Venezuela late last year.

Chavez made the announcement a day after telling a meeting of allied leaders that Latin America overall would be better off without the U.S.-backed World Bank or IMF. He has often blamed their lending policies for perpetuating poverty.

The leftist president also has repeatedly criticized past Venezuelan governments for signing structural adjustment agreements with the IMF that were blamed for contributing to racing inflation.

Under former Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez in 1989, violent protests broke out in Caracas in response to IMF austerity measures that brought a hike in subsidized gasoline prices and public transport fares.

Enraged people took over the streets in violence that killed at least 300 people—and possibly many more. The riots came to be known as the "Caracazo," and Chavez often refers to it as a rebellion against the status quo.

Dow Highs Create False Hopes

2007-04-25T13:21:00.000-07:00

It looks like a cause for celebration: The Dow Jones industrial average surged from 12,000 to 13,000 in just six months. But appearances can be deceiving, and there may be more reason to worry rather than rejoice about Wall Street's latest accomplishment...

Dow Ends Above 13,000 for First Time As Earnings Reports Push Stock Market to Historic Heights

Stronger-than-expected profits from several large companies helped push the stock market to historic heights. But many big corporations, including the Dow components, made a chunk of that money overseas, where economies are growing faster than in the U.S. And many of the same worries that weighed on investors earlier in the year remain: rising energy costs, a slumping housing market and a possible credit crunch.

The stock market's best-known indicator surged past its latest milestone shortly after trading began Wednesday, and even made it past 13,100, rising as high as 13,107.45. According to preliminary calculations, it closed at 13,087.46 up 133.52 or 1.03 percent.

Chavez: Troops to escort oil takeovers

2007-04-13T11:34:00.000-07:00

CARACAS, Venezuela - President Hugo Chavez said Thursday that soldiers will accompany government officials when they take over oil projects in the Orinoco River basin next month.

Chavez has decreed that Petroleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA, will take a minimum 60 percent stake in four heavy-oil projects in the Orinoco River region and invited the six private companies operating there to stay on as minority partners.

"On May 1 we are going to take control of the oil fields," Chavez said. "I'm sure no transnational company is going to draw a shotgun, but we will go with the armed forces and the people."

The projects — run by BP PLC, Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp., ConocoPhillips, France's Total SA and Norway's Statoil ASA — upgrade heavy, tar-like crude into more marketable oils and are considered Venezuela's most promising. As older fields elsewhere go into decline, development of the Orinoco is seen as key to Venezuela's future production.

Negotiations over the takeover have yet to yield an agreement and are expected to be difficult as the companies seek a deal that takes into account more than $17 billion in investments and loans related to the projects.

Chavez has been given special powers by congress for 18 months to issue laws by decree in energy and other areas, which he has also used to nationalize the country's biggest telecommunications company and electricity company.

Chavez has justified the nationalizations as necessary to give the government control of sectors strategic to Venezuela's interests.

The New Russian Revolution

2007-04-11T08:56:00.000-07:00

'I am plotting a New Russian Revolution'

Ian Cobain, Matthew Taylor and Luke Harding in Moscow

The Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky has told the Guardian he is plotting the violent overthrow of President Putin from his base in Britain after forging close contacts with members of Russia's ruling elite.

In comments which appear calculated to enrage the Kremlin, and which will further inflame relations between London and Moscow, the multimillionaire claimed he was already bankrolling people close to the president who are conspiring to mount a palace coup.

"We need to use force to change this regime," he said. "It isn't possible to change this regime through democratic means. There can be no change without force, pressure." Asked if he was effectively fomenting a revolution, he said: "You are absolutely correct."

Although Mr Berezovsky, with an estimated fortune of £850m, may have the means to finance such a plot, and although he enjoyed enormous political influence in Russia before being forced into exile, he said he could not provide details to back up his claims because the information was too sensitive.

Last night the Kremlin denounced Mr Berezovsky's comments as a criminal offence which it believed should undermine his refugee status in the UK.

Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin's chief spokesman, said: "In accordance with our legislation [his remarks are] being treated as a crime. It will cause some questions from the British authorities to Mr Berezovsky. We want to believe that official London will never grant asylum to someone who wants to use force to change the regime in Russia."

It will not be the first time the British government has faced accusations from the Kremlin that it is providing a safe haven for Mr Berezovsky. When he told a Moscow radio station last year that he wanted to see Mr Putin overthrown by force, Jack Straw, then foreign secretary, told the Commons that "advocating the violent overthrow of a sovereign state is unacceptable" and warned the tycoon he could be stripped of his refugee status.

Russian authorities subsequently sent an extradition request to London. That failed, however, when a district judge ruled Mr Berezovsky could not be extradited as long as he has asylum status.

In an interview with the Guardian, however, Mr Berezovsky goes much further than before, claiming to be in close contact with members of Russia's political elite who, he says, share his view that Mr Putin is damaging Russia by rolling back democratic reforms, smothering opposition, centralising power and flouting the country's constitution.

"There is no chance of regime change through democratic elections," he says. "If one part of the political elite disagrees with another part of the political elite - that is the only way in Russia to change the regime. I try to move that."

While declining to describe these contacts - and alleging that they would be murdered if they were identified - he maintained that he was offering his "experience and ideology" to members of the country's political elite, as well as "my understanding of how it could be done". He added: "There are also practical steps which I am doing now, and mostly it is financial."

Mr Berezovsky said he was unconcerned by any threat to strip him of his refugee status. "Straw wasn't in a position to take that decision. A judge in court said it wasn't in the jurisdiction of Straw."

He added that there was even less chance of such a decision being taken following the polonium-210 poisoning last November of his former employee, Alexander Litvinenko. "Today the reality is different because of the Litvinenko case."

Mr Berezovsky, 61, a former mathematician, turned to business during the Yeltsin years and made his fortune by capturing state assets at knockdown prices during Russia's rush towards privatisation.

Although he played a key role in ensuring Mr Putin's victory in the 2000 presidential elections, the two men fell out as the newly elected leader successfully wrested control of Russia back from the so-called oligarchy, the small group of tycoons who had come to dominate the country's economy.

A few months after the election Mr Berezovsky fled Russia, and applied successfully for asylum in the UK after Mr Litvinenko, an officer with the KGB's successor, the FSB, came forward to say he had been ordered to murder the tycoon.

Mr Berezovsky changed his name to Platon Elenin, Platon being the name of a character in a Russian film based loosely upon his life. He was subsequently given a British passport in this name.

As well as claiming to be financing and encouraging coup plotters in Moscow, Mr Berezovsky said he had dedicated much of the last six years to "trying to destroy the positive image of Putin" that many in the west held, portraying him whenever possible as a dangerously anti-democratic figure. He said he had also opposed the Russian president through Kommersant, the influential Russian newspaper which he controlled until last year.

Last month Mr Berezovsky was questioned by two detectives from the Russian prosecutor general's office who were in London to investigate the death of Mr Litvinenko. He has denied claims that he refused to answer many of their questions.

Last night the Kremlin said Russian authorities might want to question him again in the light of his interview with the Guardian. "I now believe our prosecutor general's office has got lots of questions for Mr Berezovsky," said Mr Peskov. He added: "His words are very interesting. This is a very sensitive issue."

The Foreign Office said it had nothing to add to Mr Straw's comments of last year.

· Audio: Berezovsky on change in Russia (25 secs)

· Audio: Berezovsky on his personal safety (34 secs)

A grim vision of the future

2007-04-08T19:59:00.000-07:00

Information chips implanted in the brain. Electromagnetic pulse weapons. The middle classes becoming revolutionary, taking on the role of Marx's proletariat. The population of countries in the Middle East increasing by 132%, while Europe's drops as fertility falls. "Flashmobs" - groups rapidly mobilised by criminal gangs or terrorists groups.

Go Read: A Grim Vision of the Future

Free Speech Battle Over Online Parody of 'Colbert Report'

2007-04-08T19:45:00.000-07:00

Free Speech Battle Over Online Parody of 'Colbert Report'

MoveOn, Brave New Films Sue Viacom For Illegal Takedown of YouTube Video

San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked a federal court last week to protect the free speech rights of MoveOn.org Civic Action and Brave New Films after their satirical send-up of "The Colbert Report" was removed from YouTube following a baseless copyright complaint from media giant Viacom.

The video, called "Stop the Falsiness," was created by MoveOn and Brave New Films as a tongue-in-cheek commentary on Colbert's portrayal of the right-wing media and parodying MoveOn's own reputation for earnest political activism. The short film, uploaded to YouTube in August 2006, includes clips from "The Colbert Report" as well as humorous original interviews about show host Stephen Colbert. In March of this year, Viacom -- the parent company of Comedy Central -- demanded that YouTube take "Stop the Falsiness" down, claiming the video infringed its copyrights.

"Our clients' video is an act of free speech and a fair use of 'Colbert Report' clips," said EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry. "Viacom knows this -- it's the same kind of fair use that 'The Colbert Report' and 'The Daily Show' rely upon every night as they parody other channels' news coverage."

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a mere allegation of copyright infringement on the Internet can result in content removal, silencing a creator before any misuse is proven. This "shoot first, ask questions later" system can silence online artists and critics, creating unfair hurdles to free speech.

"Online sites like YouTube have revolutionized political expression and can give the little guy an audience of millions for a political point of view. An entertainment powerhouse like Viacom must not be allowed to muzzle independent video creators and their free speech," said Eli Pariser, Executive Director of MoveOn.org Civic Action. "Copyright owners need to double-check their claims and think about free speech rights before erasing political content from sites like YouTube and misusing the DMCA."

The lawsuit asks for a declaratory judgment that "Stop the Falsiness" does not infringe any Viacom copyright, as well as damages and injunctive relief restraining Viacom from bringing any more copyright claims in connection with the video. EFF is working with Stanford's Center for Internet and Society in this case.

For more on the lawsuit:
http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/moveon_v_viacom

To watch "Stop the Falsiness":
http://falsiness.org/

For an update on the case:
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/005177.php

For this release:
http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2007_03.php#005176

Venezuela's new steps toward socialism

2007-03-31T09:27:00.000-07:00

The question of who owns and controls the means of production is a key question for socialists. The public ownership of the banks and means of production is a cornerstone of a socialist economy, because it deprives the exploiting capitalist class of its single greatest source of power—its ownership of wealth. It opens the possibility for the immense value created by the labor of the working class to be organized and distributed according to people’s needs.

By Ben Becker

'Nothing stops the revolution'

On Jan. 8, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez sent tremors through the international capitalist market when he announced a new wave of nationalizations. These nationalizations would eliminate foreign control over the country’s largest telecommunications and electricity companies.

Venezuelan lawmakers, shouting ‘Long live socialism,’ gave President Chávez the go-ahead Jan. 31 to carry out revolutionary measures by decree.

The state would also take majority control over the Orinoco oil fields, which are responsible for 18 percent of Venezuela’s total crude oil production. Those fields are currently being exploited by oil companies like ConocoPhillips, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, BP, Norway’s Statoil and France’s Total.

The day of the announcement, the Caracas Stock Exchange dropped 19 percent, as stockholders rapidly sold their shares in the soon-to-be nationalized industries. This widespread alarm reduced to mere caution when Chávez announced that owners of the nationalized companies would be compensated for their loss.

The market accordingly rebounded, but the fear of widespread state expropriations—reminiscent of the Cuban Revolution—is now imprinted on the collective psyche of foreign investors who still hold out hope for sucking profits from Venezuela’s natural wealth.

They have quite a bit to be worried about. Chávez already proclaimed the trajectory of the revolution when he said, "Dec. 3, 2006"—the day of his landslide re-election—"will remain in history painted red." He proclaimed the next phase of the revolution to be the "National Simon Bolivar Project of 2007-2021," in which "Bolivarian socialism" will decisively be built.

The nationalizations will not stop with the electricity and telecommunications. On Jan. 8, Chávez stated, "All of that which was privatized, let it be nationalized." He specifically identified for state control strategic sectors such as hydrocarbons.

In another important move, Chávez announced that the state would increase its control over the country’s central bank. While the world’s largest financial firms whined that the bank must remain "independent"—actually, dependent only on the biggest imperialist banks—Chávez countered that it would remain "autonomous within the purview of the state."

When the major Venezuelan corporations coordinated a nationwide oil lockout in 2002-2003, in order to break the back of the Bolivarian movement, the economy reeled and spent much of the rest of the year in recovery. The movement regrouped stronger than ever, but the damage reflected an unmistakable truth: Key industries and sectors of the Venezuelan economy are still in private hands. They are an umbilical cord linked directly to U.S. imperialism, the main enemy of the Bolivarian revolution.

Of course, capitalist governments also nationalize private industries on occasion. In fact, the Venezuelan government nationalized the oil industry in 1975-76. However, the nationalization was on a capitalist basis, with the profits still flowing to national and foreign investors—at a time when 80 percent of the people lived in poverty. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the royalty payments were highly favorable to foreign and national corporations, and the industry was on the verge of being totally privatized.

With Chávez’s first presidential term in 1999, the new Bolivarian Constitution mandated that Venezuela’s oil is permanently prohibited from being privatized. In recent years, the Chávez government has obligated oil investors to pay higher rates of royalties to the state.

The real question is not whether the economy is in state hands or private hands, but what class interests the state represents. That question is being posed more sharply with every passing day in Venezuela.

Chávez and his allies in government are revolutionaries who have created a dual-power situation with parallel institutions like health care, education and energy to challenge and replace the still-existing capitalist superstructure, and directly meet the needs of the people.

The question of state power still remains. Chávez’s Jan. 8 declaration of accelerated moves towards socialist transformation is encouraging news.

The enabling law

The bold declarations on the economic front need to be put in the context of decisive action in the political arena. The

National Assembly announced it was granting Chávez new "enabling" legislation to allow him to pass by decree new laws for 18 months in strategic areas of government, including oil affairs and the transformation of state institutions.

Such enabling laws are nothing new. They are a holdover from the pre-Bolivarian Constitution. Chávez’s predecessors exercised the same authority. Every law Chávez issues is still subject to reversal by popular referendum.

Yet these laws have unleashed howls of criticism from the imperialists and their Venezuelan supporters. They portray them as signs of authoritarianism—a hollow charge by the same forces that cheered on the coup attempt against Chávez in 2002 and welcome the increasingly centralized powers of the Bush administration’s executive branch.

What these pro-imperialist critics fear is what Chávez will do with these new powers. They fear that he will accelerate the process of nationalization, that he will begin to undermine the rights of private property altogether, and, above all, that he will call the masses into a decisive battle against the oil moguls, rich landowners and government careerists and bureaucrats that have at every step tried to blunt and block the anti-capitalist initiatives of the Bolivarian movement.

The United Socialist Party

These measures from above will be strengthened by a new socialist party—the United Socialist Party of Venezuela—which is to be built "from below," drawing on the people’s already existing community councils and social "missions."

The mobilization of the Venezuelan masses has been an indispensable feature of the Bolivarian revolution. It was the great force of the people in the streets that won Chávez two presidential elections, and defended their gains in the streets by defeating the 2002 coup attempt and the well-financed 2004 anti-Chávez referendum. The mass demonstrations in support of the Bolivarian movement—in which red clothing, flags and banners fill the streets of Caracas—have punctuated each one of these victories.

The challenge has been to consolidate these explosive political activities into a united fighting organization, a political party, with a clearly defined plan of action. The Venezuelan movement has been gripped with the same problems facing revolutionaries everywhere: how to turn an activist force into a sustaining force capable of remaking society in the interests of the working class.

To answer this key question, Chávez announced the disbandment of his existing electoral coalition, the Movement for a Fifth Republic (MVR), and the creation of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.

In his Dec. 15 speech explaining the need for a new party, Chávez noted the example of the Units for the Electoral Battle (UBEs). The UBEs were community-based units organized in 2004 to ensure a pro-Chávez vote in the referendum.

"Afterwards, I asked everyone to maintain the UBEs … but almost everywhere they were lost," Chávez explained. "Let us be sure this does not happen after our great victory of Dec. 3."

Now is the time, Chávez explained, to strive to keep all popular councils and Bolivarian battalions intact. "Let not a single squad dissolve," he declared.

The new party will be "a political instrument at the service not of blocs or groupings but of the people and the Revolution, at the service of socialism."

The party will be built on new foundations. Leaders will be drawn from the existing community organizations and elected on account of their self-sacrifice and commitment. Pointing to the collapse of the Soviet Union—when the powerful Soviet working class remained passive at the decisive political moments—Chávez called on the new party to deeply connect with Venezuela’s oppressed.

Although the specific program of the new party has not been publicized yet, revolutionaries and progressives of the world should greet the United Socialist Party of Venezuela with enthusiasm. It is the most significant attempt to handle the question of political organization—real political independence from the corrupt political parties of the old ruling class—for Venezuela’s toilers.

Accelerating towards socialism

In the seven years since Chávez was first elected, the Bolivarian movement broke the monopoly of political control maintained by the Venezuelan lackeys of Washington. A new constitution created the legal framework for genuine democracy. The Bolivarian Circles represented the seedlings of a new people’s power. The Bolivarian government redistributed the country’s vast natural wealth toward social programs, substantially improving the living standards of Venezuela’s poor.

In this first phase, Chávez’s coalition engaged millions of people just coming into political life and thousands of dedicated community activists. It attracted the country’s best socialists and revolutionaries.

But it also included capitalists and reformists—people with no vision of socialism, who opposed imperialism only from the perspective of improving Venezuelan capitalism. Bureaucrats and careerists also affixed themselves to the Chávez coalition after its 1998 victory as a means for personal gain.

The Bolivarian revolution still faces the threat of imperialist invasion and U.S.-backed coups. But Chávez has already made clear—even if in not so many words—that the next stage of the Bolivarian movement will be marked by struggle within the Chávez camp. It will be a period of political and class differentiation between those who are prepared to lead the way towards "socialism of the 21st century" and those who see the revolution as a glorified capitalist welfare state.

Battles are looming. As in all battles, timing is of decisive importance. The opposition is reeling from its electoral failures, and the Venezuelan workers are more emboldened than ever. Chávez has judged that the timing is right to launch an offensive.

This offensive can take several forms. On one hand, there may be explicit pro- Chávez, anti-bureaucracy protests, such as the October 2006 demonstration that drew 12,000 people into the streets of Mérida, Venezuela. On the other hand, the government has provided $1.8 billion and an infrastructure for 12,000 community councils, which Chávez openly compares to the Soviets—the councils of workers, peasants and soldiers—of the Russian Revolution. These institutions, if they continue to thrive, serve as a direct counterweight to the remnants of the old capitalist state apparatus.

Chávez’s principal slogan, now adorning billboards and newspaper spreads across the country, is: "Nothing stops the revolution." With a new party under construction, greater executive authority and a powerful working class marching alongside him—now with important, living experience in political struggle—the slogan seems to capture the reality of the Venezuelan revolutionary process.

Covert shenanigans in Africa

2007-03-30T09:09:00.000-07:00

Covert shenanigans in Africa. The "usual suspects" are involved.

Our intelligence sources in Africa report that the recent rebellion in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) by forces loyal to Jean-Pierre Bemba, the warlord who was defeated in the recent presidential election by current President Joseph Kabila, was supported by U.S. and other Western intelligence services. At least 600 people died in the violence in Congo, which was mainly centered in the capital of Kinshasa. Bemba, the leader of the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC), took refuse in the embassy of South Africa after his rebellion was put down by the national army. Congo's prosecutor general has indicted Bemba for treason and inciting rebellion. A search of MLC storage facilities revealed that Bemba's supporters had been wearing new uniforms of the Congolese National Army to commit atrocities in Kinshasa that would later be blamed on Kabila.

Bemba's asylum in the South African embassy is interesting considering what out sources have told us about South Africa's role in the Bemba rebellion. On March 23, 2007, a massive explosion destroyed a Soviet-built warehouse in the Mozambican capital of Maputo. Over 150 people were killed in the explosion and hundreds were wounded. Debris from the explosion was found up to 1 kilometer away from the scene. The explosion was officially blamed on high temperatures in Maputo (93 Fahrenheit -- not unusually hot for the Mozambican capital). However, our sources report that the explosion was set off deliberately by South African mercenaries who had been stealing weapons from the warehouse, including armored-piercing shells, for use in the Bemba coup attempt in Congo and a planned Improvised Explosion Device (IED) assassination attempt against Zimbabwe's embattled President Robert Mugabe. The arms had been warehoused after truce between warring factions in the long Mozambican civil war.

Our intelligence sources report that before the explosion, four ex-members of the South African Defense Force, including two pilots, infiltrated Maputo and blew up the arms warehouse after they removed weapons for transport to Zimbabwe and Congo via Zambia. Two of the South Africans have allegedly been linked to the South African mercenary firm Erinys, Ltd. The firm has been contracted to the U.S. occupation forces in Iraq through SASI, a US subcontractor of Erinys Iraq, which, itself, is linked to Ahmad Chalabi and Nour USA Ltd., a firm based in northern Virginia.

The theft of weapons from arms warehouses in countries that collect such arms in post-civil war buy back programs and then blowing up the warehouses to cover up the thefts is not limited to Mozambique. WMR discovered in Cambodia a similar incident. On March 2, WMR reported on a series of warehouses in Cambodia collecting bought-back weapons from ex-members of the Khmer Rouge that have also been targeted by international arms smugglers: "Storage facilities with so-called 'enhanced security' were constructed in Phnom Penh (several facilities), Battambang, Pailin, Banteay Meanchey, Siem Reap, Banteay Srei, Preah Vihear, and Kampong Thom. The suspicions about Israeli involvement in smuggling stored Khmer Rouge and other weapons were heightened in 1999 after a mysterious fire destroyed the Cambodian military weapons storage facility at the Ream Naval Base near Sihanoukville. According to a New Zealand intelligence officer in Cambodia, the depot was destroyed by an Israeli squad after it was revealed they were smuggling weapons from the facility to guerrilla groups throughout Southeast Asia, including the small "Free Vietnam Movement" battling Vietnam's central government and Hmong guerrillas battling Laotian government forces. The Vietnamese became even more suspicious about the role of the depot after weapons from the Ream warehouse were seized by Cambodian and Vietnamese police at the Bavet border checkpoint. The weapons were destined for guerrillas of the Free Vietnam Movement. WMR visited Phnom Penh, Cambodia and discovered that the Mossad and Cambodian criminal syndicate allies continue to obtain bought-back Cambodian weapons from Cambodian government warehouses and are selling them to guerrilla groups throughout Asia, including Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers, anti-Laotian Hmongs, the small anti-communist Free Vietnam Movement, and Burmese tribal guerrilla groups."

WMR has learned from African intelligence sources that Israeli intelligence assets were also involved in the transfer of weapons from the Maputo arms warehouse to Zimbabwe and the DRC.

Note: A US State Department source has informed us that an Indian general recently confirmed our earlier report about the smuggling of arms by Israeli intelligence assets from Cambodia to the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.

~ Wayne Madsen

The "National ID Card" Myth

2007-03-29T17:56:00.000-07:00

As usual, the “civil libertarians” are mistaken. There’s no “national ID card,” let alone one that will destroy our “civil liberties.”

A 2005 federal statute provided that in 2008 “a Federal agency may not accept, for any official purpose, a driver’s license or identification card issued by a State to any person unless the State is meeting the requirements of this section.” “‘Official purpose’ includes but is not limited to accessing Federal facilities, boarding federally regulated commercial aircraft, entering nuclear power plants, and any other purpose that the Secretary [of Homeland Security] may determine.”

Applicants for state-issued ID must provide certain kinds of proof (e.g., citizenship or legal residency), and the state-issued ID must contain certain kinds of information (e.g., name, photograph, date of birth).

Unarguably, Congress has the textual power, augmented by over 200 years of Supreme Court decisions, to legislate on a broad range of ID-related subjects—e.g., the use of passports, production of veteran documents to obtain benefits, the possession of draft and social security cards, the public display of licenses for all manner of personal and business activity.

Moreover, for federal purposes, the federal government is not obligated to accept any state identification documents. One can’t reenter the United States, obtain VA benefits, or possess DEA privileges on the strength of a driver’s license.

Reciprocally, no state need comply with the ID statute.

Although the Secretary of Homeland Security has the power to make administrative regulations enlarging the category of “other [federal] purposes,” he hasn’t done so. When he does, they will be subject to judicial review.

What, then, upsets the “civil libertarians”?

Some say state compliance will be “too expensive.” Typically, not only do they offer no proof, but, ironically, for many of them few state spending programs have ever been “too expensive”—especially if they were for some boondoggle like welfare.

Others spout empty slogans like “if we lose our identification card, we lose our identity, we lose our ability to access the services and infrastructure that society offers.” A Texas Congressman, speaking of the statute, loftily complained that in Washington “[t]here is no rule of law. There is no respect for the Constitution.”

One searches in vain for any serious commentary plausibly arguing that under the Constitution and Supreme Court opinions Congress lacks the power to have enacted the statute. Nor have any serious attempts been made to show any provision in the statute that requires states to comply—indeed, some states are considering opting out.

And perhaps most important of all, there have been no serious examples proffered of how the statute violates Americans’ civil liberties—especially today, when the United States is in at least a de facto war with radical Islam.

On the other hand, there are manifest benefits to be had from full implementation of the statute. Foremost is greatly reducing the incalculable amount of forged and stolen identification papers that this country is awash in — from driver’s licenses, to social security cards, to credit cards, and more — all of which facilitate illegal immigration, identity theft, and other criminal activity.

By itself, that’s reason enough for the states to cooperate.

A potentially greater reason is the impact on criminals and terrorists of, again, state-issued ID— which can’t be issued without clear proof of identity and status, and will contain crucial information of no threat to anyone engaged in lawful conduct. It is well known that the September 11, 2001, hijackers relied on phony documents to facilitate their destruction of the World Trade Center and murder some 3,000 innocent souls. Perhaps more stringent ID requirements would have prevented that calamity—perhaps not.

But given the stakes, neither the American government nor we the people can afford to take the chance of guessing wrong.

by Henry Mark Holzer, Professor Emeritus at Brooklyn Law School, is an appellate lawyer who specializes in constitutional law. You can contact him via his website: www.henrymarkholzer.com.

MKULTRA Mind Control

2007-03-28T13:47:00.000-07:00

McCain Warns Against Spread of Socialism

2007-03-21T18:00:00.000-07:00

McCain Warns Against Spread of Socialism

"They inspire each other. They assist each other. They get ideas from each other," McCain said. "It's very disturbing."

Full Story

Environmentalism is the new Communism

2007-03-21T10:54:00.000-07:00

Environmentalism has replaced Communism as threat to freedom...

" ...adopting tough environmental policies to fight climate change would have destructive impact on national economies.

This ideology preaches earth and nature and under the slogans of their protection – similarly to the old Marxists – wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central, now global, planning of the whole world."

Full Story

SPP Video

2007-03-21T09:01:00.001-07:00

Chaos In The New World Order

2007-03-21T08:53:00.000-07:00

Chaos En Novus Ordo Seclorum

"Make me one with everything" - Buddhist in a pizza parlour

Unification of Europe was first - now the North American Union is in full swing - replete with fuzzy, double-speak, feel good names like Harmonization, Deep Integration, Free Trade, Security and Prosperity Partnership Agreement, etc. These measures, based on negating geopolitical boundaries and securing monopolistic markets, will ultimately lead to the clash of cultures, as has already begun. Of course the elite will have a solution for the Hegelian problem they created, namely, a new world order – with themselves as puppet masters pulling our strings.

"For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as "internationalists" and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it." - David Rockefeller 2002 autobiography Memoirs

There is a small, but powerful group of individuals who are the architects and instigators behind the formation and implementation of the New World Order. Their plans represent a consciously organized attempt to bring about an end to national sovereignty and western democracy.

"David Rockefeller is the most conspicuous representative today of the ruling class, a multinational fraternity of men who shape the global economy and manage the flow of its capital. Rockefeller was born to it, and he has made the most of it. But what some critics see as a vast international conspiracy, he considers a circumstance of life and just another day's work... In the world of David Rockefeller it's hard to tell where business ends and politics begins" - Bill Moyers

Their motivations are the age old human traits of greed and power – their instruments of control include the monopolization of corporate interests and banking, influence of political power, enforcement of laws utilizing a ruthless and centralized military, the manipulation of opinion engendered through academic circles, and the control of mainstream media which provides the necessary propaganda tool to shape public consciousness.

"We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected the promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world-government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the National autodetermination practiced in past centuries" - David Rockefeller - address to a Trilateral Commission

North America is being transformed from three distinct countries - Canada, USA and Mexico, into a single economic entity called the North American Union. The creation of this new state is being implemented by stealth, virtually without opposition, and in front of an unwitting population.

"The unaware are unaware that they are unaware" - Bo Britz

The method of enforcement for the North American Union is a police state. Under the guise of keeping us all safe with anti-terrorist laws, citizens will lose their civil liberties preventing any dissent against Big Brother.

"Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death." - Adolf Hitler

"There ought to be limits to freedom" - GW Bush

Learning the truth about 9/11, and its integral part in the formation of the new world order, helps us to understand the concepts and objectives of the globalists. Just as this event has been used to justify such horrific acts of aggression and suppression of freedoms, we can use it to expose those who are truly responsible, and start to heal the deep wounds afflicted by such aberrations of humanity.

The ruling elite do not care about human rights, or true democracy, indeed, these values stand in the way of achieving their goals. For the current cabal, the end justifies the means, as vividly demonstrated by the events of 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq, just to name the most obvious. Their objectives must be implemented with the use of corruption and deceit, simply because nobody would willingly vote for the kind of world they are trying to build.

"We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order." - David Rockefeller

I remember going to the annual exhibition in Toronto as a kid. Inside a tent this magician was waving handkerchiefs over a girl who appeared to be suspended in mid air in front of him. Because I knew that humans could not just float above the ground, I was intrigued and determined to get as close as possible, and really look at what they were doing. Sure enough, the loose drapery hanging off the table at the back concealed, upon closer scrutiny, a protruding steel bar which held up the woman. I couldn't help but think-as I stepped once again to the back of the tent, a throng of people now in front of me-this is actually a really good trick, as long as you don't look too close or think too hard.

That's how I feel about 9-11. Nice try, fellas. You gave us a good dog & pony show-lots of fireworks; a quick and ready story filled with a cast of radical Muslim villains, all prepackaged for us to hate; and this guy with a beard in a cave, who can play evil mind-tricks from across the ocean-but the jig is up. And please don't think I'm being flippant or disrespectful to the many lives that have been so tragically taken through this horrendous act and all its subsequent horrors.

"The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the TRUTH becomes the greatest ENEMY OF THE STATE." - Dr. Joseph M. Goebbels

Once we expose the fraudulence of 9/11, the entire globalist agenda will tumble like a house of cards, or in this case, a "twin tower". Understanding this event within its greater context, we can pull the lynch-pin on the plans for the North American Union, and generate some much needed chaos in the new world order.

"Three things cannot long be hidden-the sun, the moon, and the truth" – Confucius

Look up and down the streets where you live. The vast majority of people in this country, and around the world, are just honest, hard working individuals who want to build a life for themselves, raise their families and enjoy their customs.

"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one "makes" them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted -- and you create a nation of law-breakers-and then you cash in on the guilt." - Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged"

Although most people are not conscious of the subtle and the not-so-subtle mechanisms of social conditioning we are bombarded with on a daily basis, rest assured the elite in charge have an agenda, a timetable, and the means with which to execute their objectives.

"A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves" - Edward R. Murrow

Here are just some of the documented features and objectives of the North American Union:

- Development of a common security perimeter by 2010

- Implementation of a North American Border Pass with biometric identifiers

- Unification of the border and expanded US controlled customs facilities

- A single economic space that shares a common external tariff

- A North American currency replacing the dollar and the peso that will be called the amero

- Seamless movement of goods within North America

- Labour mobility between Canada and the U.S.

- A North American energy strategy as a regional alternative to Kyoto

- A North American regulatory plan that includes "open skies and open roads"

- A unified approach on food, health, and the environment

- A permanent tribunal for trade and investment disputes

- An annual North American summit meeting

- Scholarships to Centers for North American Studies

- The NAFTA superhighway, a north-south interstate trade corridor linking Mexico, Canada and the U.S. The NAFTA superhighway will bypass U.S. entryways and allow global conglomerates to capitalize by exploiting cheap labour, bypassing local union considerations, and exposing the entire continent to potential security risks.

NAFTA , SPP, GATT, WTO and other trade agreements are the means by which the globalist political regime have expanded into North America. Different from the IMF, which can wield its power through financial dispensations to third world countries, these trade agreements supersede local regulatory powers, and through the force of national law, ensure that transnational interests are in a sense codified into each constitutional framework.

Opponents to the NAU include progressives in all three countries who believe the union would be detrimental to the average citizen. Chief among their many concerns is the loss of sovereignty and democracy, the relinquishment of authority to unelected corporations with privately contracted law enforcement, and the displacement of a workforce due to an influx of immigrants.

So what can we do? Many things. We have incredible power in our numbers and in our potential economic influence. The system would collapse without our cooperation. What we lack is the solidarity of purpose, and organization of our huge numbers.

"A nation of well-informed men, who have been taught to know and prize the rights that God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins!" - Benjamin Franklin

We are living in a critical time of change, our number one weapon in this new age is our understanding of the forces set to control us, and an effective response in great numbers from people willing to assert their independence and freedom - there was once a great country built on such ideals.

"Suddenly the whole world is not enough punishment for the wicked, nor reward for the good" - Taoist saying

We live within a duality of perception every moment. Within rages the battle of desire and reality, while on the outside, the ancient struggle between those who would work for the benefit of society, through peace, and those forces set upon exploiting others for profit and control, through destruction. Alone, we have the responsibility to assert our complete sovereignty first as individuals, and by extension of ourselves, to the greater group of which we are all a part.

Unification does not have to mean deceit and tyranny. National identities and human rights can be maintained while we come together on many things that might benefit us all. Just as we must accept the inner conflicts that cause us to adjust our desires, and with the right choices lead to a reinvention of ourselves in order to adapt, we also must recognize and challenge those external forces that would promote marginalization and exclusion of others, and create struggles that would constrain us in our inevitable choice between good and evil, and ultimately our ability to survive.

A native American grandfather was talking to his grandson about how he felt. He said 'I feel as if I have two wolves fighting in my heart. One wolf is the vengeful, angry, violent one. The other wolf is the loving, compassionate one.' The grandson asked him, 'Which wolf will win the fight in your heart?' The grandfather answered: 'The one I feed.' - Native American Story

On the grand chessboard of the power elite in this world, we may only represent insignificant entities, insofar as we are concerned as individuals. However, when considered as a group, we can have considerable influence. Our strength in numbers only serves our cause to the detriment when we blindly live our lives as revenue generating hunks of flesh that serve as an economic engine for the ruling class - it is our ignorance that works against us. When we are illuminated with the light of truth and understanding, we can then use that power to influence the course of events and make the big machine grind to a halt, or at least cause a few gold hubcaps to fly off. All this can be accomplished through non-violent means, lest we sink to the level of our enemies, in which case we risk becoming that which we oppose.

"Because we are part of one existence, whomsoever you are hurting, you are hurting yourself in the long run. Today you may not realize it, but one day when you become more aware; then you will say, 'My God! This wound was inflicted by me -- upon myself.' You had hurt somebody else thinking that people are different. Nobody is different. This whole existence is one, cosmic unity. Out of this understanding comes non-violence." - Osho

There is room for everyone in this world. My beliefs tell me that every human dynamic resolves from its highest intellectual level down to understanding and compassion. I know in my heart that we could be caring enough to engender a consciousness where there is consideration for all people on this earth. And I know if we use our heads, we could be creative and resourceful enough to find a way to do it while abolishing the act of war itself.

That would be my New World Order.

"If one has a self - it is impossible to achieve the great oneness" - Taoist saying

The U.S. property crash

2007-03-17T08:12:00.000-07:00

"You can't believe how bad it's going to get..."

By Elif Kaban

Commodities investment guru Jim Rogers stepped into the U.S. subprime fray on Wednesday, predicting a real estate crash that would trigger defaults and spread contagion to emerging markets.

"You can't believe how bad it's going to get before it gets any better," the prominent U.S. fund manager told Reuters by telephone from New York.

"It's going to be a disaster for many people who don't have a clue about what happens when a real estate bubble pops.

"It is going to be a huge mess," said Rogers, who has put his $15 million belle epoque mansion on Manhattan's Upper West Side on the market and is planning to move to Asia.

Worries about losses in the U.S. mortgage market have sent stock prices falling in Asia and Europe, with shares in financial services companies falling the most.

Some investors fear the problems of lenders who make subprime loans to people with weak credit histories are spreading to mainstream financial firms and will worsen the U.S. housing slowdown.

"Real estate prices will go down 40-50 percent in bubble areas. There will be massive defaults. This time it'll be worse because we haven't had this kind of speculative buying in U.S. history," Rogers said.

"When markets turn from bubble to reality, a lot of people get burned."

The fund manager, who co-founded the Quantum Fund with billionaire investor George Soros in the 1970s and has focused on commodities since 1998, said the crisis would spread to emerging markets which he said now faced a prolonged bear run.

"When you have a financial crisis, it reverberates in other financial markets, especially in those with speculative excess," he said.

"Right now, there is huge speculative excess in emerging markets around the world. There will be a lot of money coming out of emerging markets.

"I've sold out of emerging markets except for China," said Rogers, long a prominent China bull.

Even in China, the world's fastest expanding economy, Rogers said stocks were overvalued and could go down 30-40 percent.

But he added: "China is one of the few countries in the world where I'm willing to sit out a 30-40 percent decline."

The last stock market bubble to burst was the dot-com craze which sparked a crash from March 2000 to October 2002.

When the last bubble burst in Japan, said Rogers, stock prices went down 85 percent despite the country's high savings rate and huge balance of payment surplus.

"This is the end of the liquidity party," said Rogers. "Some emerging markets will go down 80 percent, some will go down 50 percent. Some will most probably collapse."

Venezuelan Fighter Shoots Down US F-16 over Cuba

2007-03-16T09:23:00.000-07:00

Venezuelan Fighter Shoots Down US F-16 over Cuba

By: Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Western Subscribers

Conflicting reports are emerging from Cuba today that allege the shooting down of an American F-16 Fighter Jet by a Venezuelan Sukhoi-30MK2 Russian Fighter Jet participating in large scale Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces wargames in Pinar del Rio province.

The United States has denied these reports and state that their F-16 Fighter Jet crashed off the coast of Cuba due to an ‘unknown’ mechanical malfunction with its pilot safely rescued after ejecting.

More curiously, however, and almost immediately after Russian Military Analysts reporting on this shoot down to the Kremlin, Cuban Defense Minister Raul Castro, the brother of the ailing Cuban Leader Fidel Castro and present leader of Cuba, issued this statement:

"If anyone attacks us, we're ready to pay any price necessary, but the price paid by the invaders of our country would be much higher."

Tensions in Latin America remain high after this latest incident, and the United States War Leaders admitting that their War on Terror has now expanded to South America with the introduction of American Military Forces into the conflict between Colombia and its rebel faction FARC.

Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, was also quick to denounce the United States by stating that it was the "most cynical, most murderous empire in all of history".

Chavez further stated that the American President, Bush, was plotting to assassinate him and vowed "100 years of war'' should the United States attack either Venezuela or Bolivia.

Concerns within the American intelligence communities are centered upon the growing power of Latin American Nations to throw off the yokes of oppression set upon them by their North American neighbors, and who have reaped incalculable wealth from their southern cousins while leaving mass poverty and environmental degradation as their most lasting legacy.

The growing power of Chavez’s Venezuela, throughout the entire Latin American World, shows no signs of abating as it spreads its vast oil wealth throughout the region in a direct threat to American and European banking and corporate interests.

Coupled with the closeness of Hugo Chavez with the Cuban regime, including Fidel Castro, an emerging, and to the United States dangerous, South American unity block is forming which will see the expulsion of American corporations from the vast wealth of Latin America.

What remains unknown to Russian Military Analysts is the

United States

militaries ability to counter their growing Latin American threat as their current military forces are said stretched to the ‘breaking point’.

Inflation Wants to Eat Your Children

2007-03-13T16:19:00.000-07:00

This week's entry into the Most Pithy Investing Advice Contained In A Headline Or Title contest is "Profiting From Companies That Sell What China Wants" by Michael Dawson of TheTimeAndMoneyGroup.com. The title says it all!

There used to be a song that went "Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets", which implied that this Lola chick was so enchanting that men gave her presents, which she greedily took, and kept demanding more, which I gave her, too, always more and more, until all my money was gone and I was forced to loot the employee retirement fund, steal money out of my wife's purse and invent reasons why the kids wouldn't be getting an allowance this week ("Sunspots made the money radioactive!") so that I could give it all to her. Only her name wasn't Lola, and in fact as I remember it, they went by various names, none of them Lola, but the point is that 1.) This title says it all, and 2.) The case is made when I point out that both Lola and China have two syllables.

And, I expect, they will both end up with all my, and our, money, and then it's, "So long, sucker!" just like always.

If you are tired of my constant, irritating harangue to buy oil stocks, in one way or another, based solely on my Stupid Mogambo Say So (SMSS), then I proudly present John Loeffler, appearing with James J. Puplava on the Financial Sense Newshour, who buttresses the "Peak Oil" case by saying that, when looking at oil production, "If we look at the number of countries that have peaked versus remaining, so far 64 countries have peaked in oil production; 36 remain."

I know what you are thinking: You are scratching your chin and thinking "Down by two-thirds? Hmmm! Maybe that Stupid Mogambo Idiot (SMI) is onto something significant here with his recommendation to buy oil!" And you would be right!

But if you went on to think to yourself, "Maybe that SMI is not as dumb as I thought!" then you would be, I am sorry to say, wrong.

I'm sure you've already heard that the Bureau of Labor Standards reported that the Consumer Price Index for all urban consumers, also known as the CPI-U, increased by 0.3% in January. Or perhaps you heard my loud scream of anguish and subsequent Hysterical Mogambo Violent Outburst (HMVO) at the report; in a lot of places it made the front page!

Either way, the latest report shows that, on an annual level, the January reading of that index, 202.4, was 2.1% higher than in January 2006.

Actually, nobody believes that inflation is really that low, and the government has already repeatedly admitted that they hedonically-adjust inflation statistics in a lot of different, although equally slimy, ways. This means that inflation is well over 3%, which is a number I choose because it is, historically, the point where smart people are panicking in the street; where shameful government and banking officials are being sacked, and there is turmoil everywhere - most of it being instigated by The Mogambo, who incessantly screams, "I am your king! Bring them to me and I shall deal with them harshly!"

But, oddly enough, everything is still calm, even though overall consumer prices rose 0.2% for the month. This mainly reflects that the prices of food, air travel and medical care went up a lot. And even core inflation (which excludes food and energy prices, so it is supposed to have a calming effect on our nerves) was up 0.3% for the month, which was NOT calming in the least.

And stepping away from sterile statistics, we get the same thing from Sprott Asset Management when they say, "In the real world, by all indications, the Malthusian shortages that began a few years ago with the most recent synchronized global economic expansion are continuing in earnest as we head into 2007. Nowhere is this more evident than in the rampant cost increases (a.k.a. inflation) that the companies we analyze are experiencing."

George Ure, of the famous UrbanSurvival.com site, hears us talking about shortages, especially of the Malthusian kind, and reports that his web bots (which are looking for Internet references to "shortage" and "scarcity") have, "for the first time since I started tracking, passed the 20-thousand hits level." So, two guys have noticed shortages appearing! Shortages are up!

If you are wearing your Expensive Junior Mogambo Ranger Watch (EJMRW), the on-board Supply/Demand Ratio Alert is beeping right now. If it is not, it is probably broken, and there is nothing you can do, because while the certificate of authenticity is certainly valid, the lifetime guarantee (like the guarantees on all Mogambo Inter-Stellar Enterprises (MISE) products and services) is not worth the paper it is printed on.

Hopefully, you will be consoled to learn that the value you received is not in the watch itself (for which you obviously overpaid) but in the lesson you just learned.

But as an astute Junior Mogambo Ranger (JMR), "you don't need no stinking watch." This, of course, may explain why sales are down (and why repeat sales are zero), and has already conjured up a mental image of the graph of the supply/demand dynamic, which has been adjusted to reflect the change in the supply curve to reflect these reported shortages, and says, "Eek! Higher prices are coming!"

Mr. Sprott sends a nervous glance over at me to see how I am taking this news about inflation. My breath is shallow and rapid, but I am not actually screaming in fear or even twitching visibly. Thus emboldened, he goes on to say, "The largest companies in the world in the mining and energy industries are all stating, with nary an exception, that the cost estimates they made a few years back for some of their biggest projects are now grossly understated."

Reader George P read these same remarks from Sprott, and he thought that this line was most remarkable; "We've heard estimates by knowledgeable sources that global money supply grew 18% last year - so shocking as to be almost unbelievable."

And if you are the least bit conversant with the bountiful plethora of examples in the historical record of what happens from such cancerous growth in a money supply, then your heart is undoubtedly beating like a trip-hammer, although you are unsure exactly why.

If you are more educated than most, and are completely familiar with what happens, then you are naturally thinking that although you have an Uzi in each hand, a Bowie knife between your teeth, are sitting on your weight in gold and silver, wearing a tinfoil hat and some cool shades, you still feel exposed and defenseless! And you need more of each!

The Mogambo reassuringly says, "That's right! It's that damned terrifying!"

Until next week,

The Mogambo Guru

Major Mortgage Lender On Bankruptcy's Doorstep

2007-03-12T20:26:00.000-07:00

by Bradley Keoun and Yalman Onaran

New Century Financial Corp., the nation's second-biggest subprime mortgage lender, said it doesn't have the cash to pay creditors who are demanding their money, increasing speculation that the company will go bankrupt.

The New York Stock Exchange, citing the credit crisis, halted trading of New Century this morning until it decides whether to keep listing the company's securities. Shares of the Irvine, California-based company, already down 90 percent in 2007, lost half their remaining value in pre-market trading, and rivals fell as much as 25 percent today.

``They're one step closer to bankruptcy,'' said Bose George, an analyst at Keefe Bruyette & Woods in New York who rates the shares ``market perform.'' ``The only possibility for survival now is for someone, potentially an investment bank, to step in.''

New Century may be insolvent because too many of its own customers -- most of whom have poor credit histories or heavy debt burdens -- aren't repaying their loans. Bad U.S. subprime mortgages are at a seven-year high, forcing more than two dozen lenders to close or sell operations. Their woes may contribute to more than 1.5 million Americans losing their homes and 100,000 people losing their jobs, according to real estate executives, economists, analysts and a Federal Reserve governor.

New Century said in a federal filing it doesn't have funds to repay lenders including Morgan Stanley, Citigroup Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. The creditors want New Century to repurchase all outstanding mortgage loans they financed.

Shares Plunge

The company's shares traded for as little as $1.36 in pre- market trading, compared with $3.21 on Friday, a day when the stock hit an eight-year low. The company said March 2 that U.S. prosecutors in Los Angeles are investigating trading in New Century's securities before a Feb. 7 announcement that it planned to restate earnings. Investigators also are examining New Century's failure to properly account for the cost of bad loans.

``It's kind of the perfect storm,'' said Vince Arscott, an analyst in the financial institutions group at Fitch Ratings. ``You throw in accounting issues and delayed filings, you throw in a criminal inquiry, and then the whole secondary market is really sour on subprime.''

Rival lenders including Fremont General Corp., Accredited Home Lenders Holding Co., and NovaStar Financial Inc. have shed more than half their value this year, and Countrywide Financial Corp., the nation's biggest mortgage company, has tumbled 17 percent.

Ripple Effects

Accredited, which fell 28 percent today, was ``considered a better player in the space,'' said Matt Howlett, an analyst at Fox-Pitt Kelton in New York. ``But they're not immune to the deplorable conditions in the subprime space. You can't create any value in this market, and the likelihood of a sale, which we thought was really the only exit, just seems more unlikely every day.''

Fremont, which shut its subprime lending operations last week under pressure from U.S. regulators, lost 16 percent today. NovaStar shed 19 percent and Countrywide declined 2.7 percent.

Analysts including Merrill Lynch & Co.'s Kenneth Bruce predicted last week New Century will go bankrupt. New Century has used up cash as rising default rates forced it to buy back loans it sold to investors when borrowers didn't make their payments. The company said last week it's in talks with lenders and potential partners about refinancing or ``other alternatives.''

`No Assurance'

New Century's financing agreements have so-called cross- default provisions that trigger accelerated payments. Should all of its creditors force it to repurchase their loans, the total obligation would be about $8.4 billion, New Century said today.

``Medium, small-size players who were addicted to Wall Street financing are at most risk,'' said David Hendler, an analyst at CreditSights Inc. in New York.

Talks with lenders are continuing, and New Century can give ``no assurance'' that efforts to refinance the debt will succeed, the company said.

Standard & Poor's cut New Century's counterparty credit rating today to D, for companies that are in payment default, from CC.

New Century has received about $975 million of financing from Morgan Stanley. Part of the money from the New York-based securities firm was used to pay Citigroup Inc. about $717 million on March 8, after Citigroup demanded repurchase of its loans, New Century said in today's filing.

Subprime Loans

Subprime loans, a term applied to some of the riskiest home mortgages, are made to borrowers unable to qualify under traditional, more stringent criteria. The loans often carry interest rates 2 to 3 percentage points higher than regular mortgages and sometimes have low initial ``teaser'' rates that adjust higher in later years. Some lenders also lowered their standards last year to bolster revenue because slumping home sales had hurt demand.

The combination made the loans more prone to default, with delinquencies at more than 12 percent in the third quarter, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. The Washington- based trade group is scheduled to release updated numbers for the fourth quarter tomorrow. Investors are increasingly shunning bonds backed by subprime loans.

``It's like a hot potato with these loans, no one wants them,'' Fitch's Arscott said.

OceanFirst Financial Corp., the holding company for OceanFirst Bank, said today it will revise 2006 earnings because buyers of some of its subprime loans are forcing the company to take them back. Borrowers of the loans -- which the bank offered starting last year through the Columbia Home Loans unit -- are already defaulting, the Toms River, New Jersey-based lender said. The loans offered to cover 100 percent of a home's value.

Countrywide's Report

Countrywide said late payments on home loans that it manages for others held steady last month. Loans at least 30 days past due remained at 4.71 percent of total loans serviced, the same as in January, the Calabasas, California-based company disclosed in monthly data released on its Web site. A year earlier, 4.29 percent of those loans were late.

Jim Shanahan, a senior analyst at Wachovia Capital Markets, cut his rating today on Countrywide to ``underperform'' from ``market perform.''

``While the origination and sale of subprime mortgages represents only a small part of the Countrywide story, we are more concerned that the weakness has spread to other sectors of the residential mortgage market,'' Shanahan wrote.

Joe Banister on IRS enforcement of nonexistent laws

2007-03-12T12:47:00.001-07:00

Parts 1,2, & 3

Crisis Looms in Mortgages

2007-03-10T21:14:00.000-08:00

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

On March 1, a Wall Street analyst at Bear Stearns wrote an upbeat report on a company that specializes in making mortgages to cash-poor homebuyers. The company, New Century Financial, had already disclosed that a growing number of borrowers were defaulting, and its stock, at around $15, had lost half its value in three weeks.

What happened next seems all too familiar to investors who bought technology stocks in 2000 at the breathless urging of Wall Street analysts. Last week, New Century said it would stop making loans and needed emergency financing to survive. The stock collapsed to $3.21.

The analyst’s untimely call, coupled with a failure among other Wall Street institutions to identify problems in the home mortgage market, isn’t the only familiar ring to investors who watched the technology stock bubble burst precisely seven years ago.

Now, as then, Wall Street firms and entrepreneurs made fortunes issuing questionable securities, in this case pools of home loans taken out by risky borrowers. Now, as then, bullish stock and credit analysts for some of those same Wall Street firms, which profited in the underwriting and rating of those investments, lulled investors with upbeat pronouncements even as loan defaults ballooned. Now, as then, regulators stood by as the mania churned, fed by lax standards and anything-goes lending.

Investment manias are nothing new, of course. But the demise of this one has been broadly viewed as troubling, as it involves the nation’s $6.5 trillion mortgage securities market, which is larger even than the United States treasury market.

Hanging in the balance is the nation’s housing market, which has been a big driver of the economy. Fewer lenders means many potential homebuyers will find it more difficult to get credit, while hundreds of thousands of homes will go up for sale as borrowers default, further swamping a stalled market.

“The regulators are trying to figure out how to work around it, but the Hill is going to be in for one big surprise,” said Josh Rosner, a managing director at Graham-Fisher & Company, an independent investment research firm in New York, and an expert on mortgage securities. “This is far more dramatic than what led to Sarbanes-Oxley,” he added, referring to the legislation that followed the WorldCom and Enron scandals, “both in conflicts and in terms of absolute economic impact.”

While real estate prices were rising, the market for home loans operated like a well-oiled machine, providing ready money to borrowers and high returns to investors like pension funds, insurance companies, hedge funds and other institutions. Now this enormous and important machine is sputtering, and the effects are reverberating throughout Main Street, Wall Street and Washington.

Already, more than two dozen mortgage lenders have failed or closed their doors, and shares of big companies in the mortgage industry have declined significantly. Delinquencies on loans made to less creditworthy borrowers — known as subprime mortgages —recently reached 12.6 percent. Some banks have reported rising problems among borrowers that were deemed more creditworthy as well.

Traders and investors who watch this world say the major participants — Wall Street firms, credit rating agencies, lenders and investors — are holding their collective breath and hoping that the spring season for home sales will reinstate what had been a go-go market for mortgage securities. Many Wall Street firms saw their own stock prices decline over their exposure to the turmoil.

“I guess we are a bit surprised at how fast this has unraveled,” said Tom Zimmerman, head of asset-backed securities research at UBS, in a recent conference call with investors.

Even now the tone accentuates the positive. In a recent presentation to investors, UBS Securities discussed the potential for losses among some mortgage securities in a variety of housing markets. None of the models showed flat or falling home prices, however.

The Bear Stearns analyst who upgraded New Century, Scott R. Coren, wrote in a research note that the company’s stock price reflected the risks in its industry, and that the downside risk was about $10 in a “rescue-sale scenario.” According to New Century, Bear Stearns is among the firms with a “longstanding” relationship financing its mortgage operation. Mr. Coren, through a spokeswoman, declined to comment.

Others who follow the industry have voiced more caution. Thomas A. Lawler, founder of Lawler Economic and Housing Consulting, said: “It’s not that the mortgage industry is collapsing, it’s just that the mortgage industry went wild and there are consequences of going wild.

“I think there is no doubt that home sales are going to be weaker than most anybody who was forecasting the market just two months ago thought. For those areas where the housing market was already not too great, where inventories were at historically high levels and it finally looked like things were stabilizing, this is going to be unpleasant.”

Like worms that surface after a torrential rain, revelations that emerge when an asset bubble bursts are often unattractive, involving dubious industry practices and even fraud. In the coming weeks, some mortgage market participants predict, investors will learn not only how lax real estate lending standards became, but also how hard to value these opaque securities are and how easy their values are to prop up.

Owners of mortgage securities that have been pooled, for example, do not have to reflect the prevailing market prices of those securities each day, as stockholders do. Only when a security is downgraded by a rating agency do investors have to mark their holdings to the market value. As a result, traders say, many investors are reporting the values of their holdings at inflated prices.

“How these things are valued for portfolio purposes is exposed to management judgment, which is potentially arbitrary,” Mr. Rosner said.

At the heart of the turmoil is the subprime mortgage market, which developed to give loans to shaky borrowers or to those with little cash to put down as collateral. Some 35 percent of all mortgage securities issued last year were in that category, up from 13 percent in 2003.

Looking to expand their reach and their profits, lenders were far too willing to lend, as evidenced by the creation of new types of mortgages — known as “affordability products” — that required little or no down payment and little or no documentation of a borrower’s income. Loans with 40-year or even 50-year terms were also popular among cash-strapped borrowers seeking low monthly payments. Exceedingly low “teaser” rates that move up rapidly in later years were another feature of the new loans.

The rapid rise in the amount borrowed against a property’s value shows how willing lenders were to stretch. In 2000, according to Banc of America Securities, the average loan to a subprime lender was 48 percent of the value of the underlying property. By 2006, that figure reached 82 percent.

Mortgages requiring little or no documentation became known colloquially as “liar loans.” An April 2006 report by the Mortgage Asset Research Institute, a consulting concern in Reston, Va., analyzed 100 loans in which the borrowers merely stated their incomes, and then looked at documents those borrowers had filed with the I.R.S. The resulting differences were significant: in 90 percent of loans, borrowers overstated their incomes 5 percent or more. But in almost 60 percent of cases, borrowers inflated their incomes by more than half.

A Deutsche Bank report said liar loans accounted for 40 percent of the subprime mortgage issuance last year, up from 25 percent in 2001.

Securities backed by home mortgages have been traded since the 1970s, but it has been only since 2002 or so that investors, including pension funds, insurance companies, hedge funds and other institutions, have shown such an appetite for them.

Wall Street, of course, was happy to help refashion mortgages from arcane and illiquid securities into ubiquitous and frequently traded ones. Its reward is that it now dominates the market. While commercial banks and savings banks had long been the biggest lenders to home buyers, by 2006, Wall Street had a commanding share — 60 percent — of the mortgage financing market, Federal Reserve data show.

The big firms in the business are Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and UBS. They buy mortgages from issuers, put thousands of them into pools to spread out the risks and then divide them into slices, known as tranches, based on quality. Then they sell them.

The profits from packaging these securities and trading them for customers and their own accounts have been phenomenal. At Lehman Brothers, for example, mortgage-related businesses contributed directly to record revenue and income over the last three years.

The issuance of mortgage-related securities, which include those backed by home-equity loans, peaked in 2003 at more than $3 trillion, according to data from the Bond Market Association. Last year’s issuance, reflecting a slowdown in home price appreciation, was $1.93 trillion, a slight decline from 2005.

In addition to enviable growth, the mortgage securities market has undergone other changes in recent years. In the 1990s, buyers of mortgage securities spread out their risk by combining those securities with loans backed by other assets, like credit card receivables and automobile loans. But in 2001, investor preferences changed, focusing on specific types of loans. Mortgages quickly became the favorite.

Another change in the market involves its trading characteristics. Years ago, mortgage-backed securities appealed to a buy-and-hold crowd, who kept the securities on their books until the loans were paid off. “You used to think of mortgages as slow moving,” said Glenn T. Costello, managing director of structured finance residential mortgage at Fitch Ratings. “Now it has become much more of a trading market, with a mark-to-market bent.”

The average daily trading volume of mortgage securities issued by government agencies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, for example, exceeded $250 billion last year. That’s up from about $60 billion in 2000.

Wall Street became so enamored of the profits in mortgages that it began to expand its reach, buying companies that make loans to consumers to supplement its packaging and sales operations. In August 2006, Morgan Stanley bought Saxon, a $6.5 billion subprime mortgage underwriter, for $706 million.

And last September, Merrill Lynch paid $1.3 billion to buy First Franklin Financial, a home lender in San Jose, Calif. At the time, Merrill said it expected First Franklin to add to its earnings in 2007. Now analysts expect Merrill to take a large loss on the purchase.

Indeed, on Feb. 28, as the first fiscal quarter ended for many big investment banks, Wall Street buzzed with speculation that the firms had slashed the value of their numerous mortgage holdings, recording significant losses.

As prevailing interest rates remained low over the last several years, the appetite for these securities only rose. In the ever-present search for high yields, buyers clamored for securities that contained subprime mortgages, which carry interest rates that are typically one to two percentage points higher than traditional loans. Mortgage securities participants say increasingly lax lending standards in these loans became almost an invitation to commit mortgage fraud. It is too early to tell how significant a role mortgage fraud played in the rocketing delinquency rates — 12.6 percent among subprime borrowers. Delinquency rates among all mortgages stood at 4.7 percent in the third quarter of 2006.

For years, investors cared little about risks in mortgage holdings. That is changing.

“I would not be surprised if between now and the end of the year at least 20 percent of BBB and BBB- bonds that are backed by subprime loans originated in 2006 will be downgraded,” Mr. Lawler said.

Still, the rating agencies have yet to downgrade large numbers of mortgage securities to reflect the market turmoil. Standard & Poor’s has put 2 percent of the subprime loans it rates on watch for a downgrade, and Moody’s said it has downgraded 1 percent to 2 percent of such mortgages that were issued in 2005 and 2006.

Fitch appears to be the most proactive, having downgraded 3.7 percent of subprime mortgages in the period.

The agencies say that they are confident that their ratings reflect reality in the mortgages they have analyzed and that they have required managers of mortgage pools with risky loans in them to increase the collateral. A spokesman for S.& P. said the firm made its ratings requirements more stringent for subprime issuers last summer and that they shored up the loans as a result.

Meeting with Wall Street analysts last week, Terry McGraw, chief executive of McGraw-Hill, the parent of S.& P., said the firm does not believe that loans made in 2006 will perform “as badly as some have suggested.”

Nevertheless, some investors wonder whether the rating agencies have the stomach to downgrade these securities because of the selling stampede that would follow. Many mortgage buyers cannot hold securities that are rated below investment grade — insurance companies are an example. So if the securities were downgraded, forced selling would ensue, further pressuring an already beleaguered market.

Another consideration is the profits in mortgage ratings. Some 6.5 percent of Moody’s 2006 revenue was related to the subprime market.

Brian Clarkson, Moody’s co-chief operating officer, denied that the company hesitates to cut ratings. “We made assumptions early on that we were going to have worse performance in subprime mortgages, which is the reason we haven’t seen that many downgrades,” he said. “If we have something that is investment grade that we need to take below investment grade, we will do it.”

Interestingly, accounting conventions in mortgage securities require an investor to mark his holdings to market only when they get downgraded. So investors may be assigning higher values to their positions than they would receive if they had to go into the market and find a buyer. That delays the reckoning, some analysts say.

“There are delayed triggers in many of these investment vehicles and that is delaying the recognition of losses,” Charles Peabody, founder of Portales Partners, an independent research boutique in New York, said. “I do think the unwind is just starting. The moment of truth is not yet here.”

On March 2, reacting to the distress in the mortgage market, a throng of regulators, including the Federal Reserve Board, asked lenders to tighten their policies on lending to those with questionable credit. Late last week, WMC Mortgage, General Electric’s subprime mortgage arm, said it would no longer make loans with no down payments.

Meanwhile, investors wait to see whether the spring home selling season will shore up the mortgage market. If home prices do not appreciate or if they fall, defaults will rise, and pension funds and others that embraced the mortgage securities market will have to record losses. And they will likely retreat from the market, analysts said, affecting consumers and the overall economy.

A paper published last month by Mr. Rosner and Joseph R. Mason, an associate professor of finance at Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business, assessed the potential problems associated with disruptions in the mortgage securities market. They wrote: “Decreased funding for residential mortgage-backed securities could set off a downward spiral in credit availability that can deprive individuals of home ownership and substantially hurt the U.S. economy.”

Agree or Disagree?

2007-03-08T11:41:00.001-08:00

Hi. I'm Karl.

Watch this video:

Homeland Security revives supersnoop

2007-03-08T10:17:00.000-08:00

Homeland Security revives the SuperSnoop

Homeland Security officials are testing a supersnoop computer system that sifts through personal information on U.S. citizens to detect possible terrorist attacks, prompting concerns from lawmakers who have called for investigations.

The system uses the same data-mining process that was developed by the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness (TIA) project that was banned by Congress in 2003 because of vast privacy violations.

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation of the project called ADVISE -- Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement -- was requested by Rep. David R. Obey, Wisconsin Democrat and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.

The investigation focuses on whether the program violates privacy laws, and the findings will be released after completion of the Iraq war supplemental spending bill, possibly as early as this week, a panel aide said.

The ADVISE and TIA data-mining projects rely on personal data to track individual behavior and consumer transactions to develop computer algorithms that create a pattern that some behavioral scientists say can predict terrorist behavior.

Data can include credit-card purchases, telephone or Internet details, medical records, travel and banking information.

Privacy concerns prompted lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to introduce legislation in January to require that government agencies disclose data-mining practices in regular reports to Congress.

"A serious discussion on the implications of data-mining programs is long overdue," Sen. Russ Feingold, Wisconsin Democrat and a sponsor of the bill, said yesterday. Sen. John E. Sununu, New Hampshire Republican, is also a bill sponsor.

"Many Americans are understandably concerned about the idea of secret government programs analyzing their personal information. Congress needs to know more about the operational aspects and privacy implications of data-mining programs before these programs are allowed to go forward," Mr. Feingold said.

A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security did not return a call for comment.

Congress also tucked language inside Homeland Security's spending bill in September requiring an investigation by the agency's inspector general, but allowed $40 million in funding to go forward in this year's budget.

"The ADVISE program is designed to extract relationships and correlations from large amounts of data to produce actionable intelligence on terrorists," the spending bill said. "A prototype is currently available to analysts in Intelligence and Analysis using departmental and other data, including some on U.S. citizens."

According to a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report in March 2003, TIA planned "to use data mining technologies to sift through personal transactions in electronic data to find patterns and associations connected to terrorist threats and activities."

"Recent increased awareness about the existence of the TIA project provoked expressions of concern about the potential for the invasion of privacy of law-abiding citizens by the government, and about the direction of the project by John Poindexter, a central figure in the Iran-Contra affair," the CRS report said.

"While the law enforcement and intelligence communities argue that more sophisticated information gathering techniques are essential to combat today's sophisticated terrorists, civil libertarians worry that the government's increased capability to assemble information will result in increased and unchecked government power, and the erosion of individual privacy," the report said.

ADVISE was initiated in 2003 following the demise of the TIA project.

The new system includes data-mining tools to digest "massive quantities of information from many different sources" to find "hidden relationships in the data," according to a 2004 report by Sandia National Laboratories and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on a Homeland Security workshop that outlined this and other technology under development.

The technology is expected to analyze more than 3 million "relationships" or connections per hour, says the report, which included an example of how friends, family members, locations and workplaces can be linked by pinging the data

Total Information Awareness Lives On

2007-03-07T10:23:00.001-08:00

Watching the Watchers

A controversial counter-terrorism program, which lawmakers halted more than two years ago amid outcries from privacy advocates, was stopped in name only and has quietly continued within the intelligence agency now fending off charges that it has violated the privacy of U.S. citizens.

Research under the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness program -- which developed technologies to predict terrorist attacks by mining government databases and the personal records of people in the United States -- was moved from the Pentagon's research-and-development agency to another group, which builds technologies primarily for the National Security Agency, according to documents obtained by National Journal and to intelligence sources familiar with the move. The names of key projects were changed, apparently to conceal their identities, but their funding remained intact, often under the same contracts.

It is no secret that some parts of TIA lived on behind the veil of the classified intelligence budget. However, the projects that moved, their new code names, and the agencies that took them over haven't previously been disclosed. Sources aware of the transfers declined to speak on the record for this story because, they said, the identities of the specific programs are classified.

Two of the most important components of the TIA program were moved to the Advanced Research and Development Activity, housed at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., documents and sources confirm. One piece was the Information Awareness Prototype System, the core architecture that tied together numerous information extraction, analysis, and dissemination tools developed under TIA. The prototype system included privacy-protection technologies that may have been discontinued or scaled back following the move to ARDA.

A $19 million contract to build the prototype system was awarded in late 2002 to Hicks & Associates, a consulting firm in Arlington, Va., that is run by former Defense and military officials. Congress's decision to pull TIA's funding in late 2003 "caused a significant amount of uncertainty for all of us about the future of our work," Hicks executive Brian Sharkey wrote in an e-mail to subcontractors at the time. "Fortunately," Sharkey continued, "a new sponsor has come forward that will enable us to continue much of our previous work." Sources confirm that this new sponsor was ARDA. Along with the new sponsor came a new name. "We will be describing this new effort as 'Basketball,' " Sharkey wrote, apparently giving no explanation of the name's significance. Another e-mail from a Hicks employee, Marc Swedenburg, reminded the company's staff that "TIA has been terminated and should be referenced in that fashion."

Sharkey played a key role in TIA's birth, when he and a close friend, retired Navy Vice Adm. John Poindexter, President Reagan's national security adviser, brought the idea to Defense officials shortly after the 9/11 attacks. The men had teamed earlier on intelligence-technology programs for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which agreed to host TIA and hired Poindexter to run it in 2002. In August 2003, Poindexter was forced to resign as TIA chief amid howls that his central role in the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-1980s made him unfit to run a sensitive intelligence program.

It's unclear whether work on Basketball continues. Sharkey didn't respond to an interview request, and Poindexter said he had no comment about former TIA programs. But a publicly available Defense Department document, detailing various "cooperative agreements and other transactions" conducted in fiscal 2004, shows that Basketball was fully funded at least until the end of that year (September 2004). The document shows that the system was being tested at a research center jointly run by ARDA and SAIC Corp., a major defense and intelligence contractor that is the sole owner of Hicks & Associates. The document describes Basketball as a "closed-loop, end-to-end prototype system for early warning and decision-making," exactly the same language used in contract documents for the TIA prototype system when it was awarded to Hicks in 2002. An SAIC spokesman declined to comment for this story.

Another key TIA project that moved to ARDA was Genoa II, which focused on building information technologies to help analysts and policy makers anticipate and pre-empt terrorist attacks. Genoa II was renamed Topsail when it moved to ARDA, intelligence sources confirmed. (The name continues the program's nautical nomenclature; "genoa" is a synonym for the headsail of a ship.)

As recently as October 2005, SAIC was awarded a $3.7 million contract under Topsail. According to a government-issued press release announcing the award, "The objective of Topsail is to develop decision-support aids for teams of intelligence analysts and policy personnel to assist in anticipating and pre-empting terrorist threats to U.S. interests." That language repeats almost verbatim the boilerplate descriptions of Genoa II contained in contract documents, Pentagon budget sheets, and speeches by the Genoa II program's former managers.

As early as February 2003, the Pentagon planned to use Genoa II technologies at the Army's Information Awareness Center at Fort Belvoir, Va., according to an unclassified Defense budget document. The awareness center was an early tester of various TIA tools, according to former employees. A 2003 Pentagon report to Congress shows that the Army center was part of an expansive network of intelligence agencies, including the NSA, that experimented with the tools. The center was also home to the Army's Able Danger program, which has come under scrutiny after some of its members said they used data-analysis tools to discover the name and photograph of 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta more than a year before the attacks.

Devices developed under Genoa II's predecessor -- which Sharkey also managed when he worked for the Defense Department -- were used during the invasion of Afghanistan and as part of "the continuing war on terrorism," according to an unclassified Defense budget document. Today, however, the future of Topsail is in question. A spokesman for the Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, N.Y., which administers the program's contracts, said it's "in the process of being canceled due to lack of funds."

It is unclear when funding for Topsail was terminated. But earlier this month, at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, one of TIA's strongest critics questioned whether intelligence officials knew that some of its programs had been moved to other agencies. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and FBI Director Robert Mueller whether it was "correct that when [TIA] was closed, that several ... projects were moved to various intelligence agencies.... I and others on this panel led the effort to close [TIA]; we want to know if Mr. Poindexter's programs are going on somewhere else."

Negroponte and Mueller said they didn't know. But Negroponte's deputy, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who until recently was director of the NSA, said, "I'd like to answer in closed session." Asked for comment, Wyden's spokeswoman referred to his hearing statements.

The NSA is now at the center of a political firestorm over President Bush's program to eavesdrop on the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States who the agency believes are connected to terrorists abroad. While the documents on the TIA programs don't show that their tools are used in the domestic eavesdropping, and knowledgeable sources wouldn't discuss the matter, the TIA programs were designed specifically to develop the kind of "early-warning system" that the president said the NSA is running.

Documents detailing TIA, Genoa II, Basketball, and Topsail use the phrase "early-warning system" repeatedly to describe the programs' ultimate aims. In speeches, Poindexter has described TIA as an early-warning and decision-making system. He conceived of TIA in part because of frustration over the lack of such tools when he was national security chief for Reagan.

Tom Armour, the Genoa II program manager, declined to comment for this story. But in a previous interview, he said that ARDA -- which absorbed the TIA programs -- has pursued technologies that would be useful for analyzing large amounts of phone and e-mail traffic. "That's, in fact, what the interest is," Armour said. When TIA was still funded, its program managers and researchers had "good coordination" with their counterparts at ARDA and discussed their projects on a regular basis, Armour said. The former No. 2 official in Poindexter's office, Robert Popp, averred that the NSA didn't use TIA tools in domestic eavesdropping as part of his research. But asked whether the agency could have used the tools apart from TIA, Popp replied, "I can't speak to that." Asked to comment on TIA projects that moved to ARDA, Don Weber, an NSA spokesman said, "As I'm sure you understand, we can neither confirm nor deny actual or alleged projects or operational capabilities; therefore, we have no information to provide."

ARDA now is undergoing some changes of its own. The outfit is being taken out of the NSA, placed under the control of Negroponte's office, and given a new name. It will be called the "Disruptive Technology Office," a reference to a term of art describing any new invention that suddenly, and often dramatically, replaces established procedures. Officials with the intelligence director's office did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.

By Shane Harris, National Journal

The Final Secret of Free Energy

2007-03-06T07:25:00.000-08:00

Nearly everything fundamental that we've been taught about EM energy is wrong or incomplete. Even the definition of energy in physics is wrong!

THE FINAL SECRET OF FREE ENERGY

T. E. Bearden

Foreword

This paper contains the real secret of tapping the vacuum energy very simply, using almost any source of potential (battery, electrostatic generator a la Swiss electrostatic device (the Testatika), elevated wire wire/250 V/m in the earth/ionosphere potential, etc). The objective is for the moderately technical reader to understand how to build and understand not only a single device, but also hundreds of different kinds of them. While it is quite simple, the "magic principle" contained in this paper only took me some 30 years to discover.

The precise definitions necessary to understand the free energy rationale are included. Also included are some very simple pseudo equations for the process. Do not underestimate these simple pseudo equations -- they tell the tale that's needed.

Also, there has been little or no time to "dress up" the paper. It's simply written down very informally, to get the necessary points across.

Nearly everything fundamental that we've been taught about EM energy is wrong or incomplete. Even the definition of energy in physics is wrong! Let me summarize a few of the things that are wrong with the classical electromagnetics (CEM) model as follows:

CEM is still utilizing a model based on a material ether. Although the Michelson-Morley experiment destroyed the material ether assumption in 1887, the classical EM model has never been corrected. It also contains no definition of charge, and no definition of potential. In many cases, algorithms to calculate a magnitude are boldfacedly and erroneously advanced as "definitions." CEM still prescribes the force fields as the causes of all EM phenomena; it has been known since 1959 that forces are effects and not causes, that EM force fields exist only in and on the charged particles of mass in the physical system, and that the potentials are the primary causes of EM phenomena. The lack of definitive definitions of mass and force in mechanics is carried over into EM theory; there is no adequate definition of EM force or of EM mass. The magnitude of the electrical charge on an electron is not quantized. Instead, it is discretized, being a function of the magnitude of the virtual photon flux (VPF) exchange between the vacuum and the charged particle. When the charged particle is placed in a potential that differs from ambient, then the magnitude of the VPF -- and hence the magnitude of the electric charge on the electron -- is altered. The CEM assumption of an "empty vacuum" is totally falsified by modern quantum mechanics. The CEM notion that EM force fields and force field waves exist in vacuum is totally false. Only potentials and potential gradients exist in the vacuum. EM waves in vacuum are not force field waves as CEM prescribes; instead, they are oscillations of potentials and potential gradients. Potentials have a bidirectional EM wave-pair structure, where the bidirectional wave pairs are phaselocked in a harmonic series. In each wave pair, photons and antiphotons are continually coupling (into spin-2 gravitons) and decoupling. This is where gravitation and electromagnetics are unified. The CEM notion that singular EM forces exist in either matter or the vacuum is false; Newton's third law requires that all forces exist in oppositive pairs. Not a single one of the equations universally taught as "Maxwell's equations" ever appeared in any book or paper by James Clerk Maxwell; instead, they are Oliver Heaviside's equations. Maxwell's actual theory was written in quaternions, which is a complete system of mathematics. The Heaviside/Gibbs vector version

(1) has a lower topology,

(2) is not a complete system of mathematics, and

(3) actually captured only a subset of Maxwell's actual theory.

Tensor theory does not recapture that which was lost.

There are even more errors in CEM, but these should suffice to make the point: Classical electromagnetics theory is seriously flawed, with archaic foundations, riddled with errors, and it should be completely redone. Until this revamping of CEM is accomplished, the present model solidly blocks free energy, antigravity, a unified physical field theory, and a unified theory of mind and matter interaction.

A second paper this year will detail the exact long-term causative mechanism for cancer and leukemia, and the exact mechanism for essentially 100% cure of terminal tumors in laboratory animals, demonstrated by the Priore team in France in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The same mechanism can be used to cure AIDS.

Throughout the world, humankind is suffering. In the poor populations of the world, early death is the norm, as is frequent famine. One third of the human race goes to bed hungry each night. Protein starvation of children is common. One third of the human race is infected with worms. Many other diseases ravage the far-flung poor peoples of the world. They have little or no industries. They have no abundant electrical power. They have little education, and little modern knowledge. They have little or no medical treatment. In short, they are born without hope; live in misery, filth, disease, and poverty, and die without dignity.

Meanwhile, the factories, cities, and enclaves of the "developed and developing" worlds belch forth fumes, toxic and hazardous wastes, and pollutants. They also spew forth weaponry which for one reason or another is used to arm the poorer nations, for use in destroying themselves and their impoverished neighbors. Warfare, terror, banditry, despotism, and all the four horsemen of the Apocalypse are truly loosed in the earth.

We simply must do better than that. And we can do better than that! But to do better, we've got to make the basics available to impoverished nations, cheaply and easily. Primary among their needs are energy and medical treatment. Given those, populations can be stabilized, people educated, development begun, and the living standard drastically elevated.

So that is the immediate goal. In this paper, I am freely giving away what required me an arduous 30 years of my life to discover. Shortly we will also detail the new methodology for a new therapeutic science, hopefully to cure the diseases that ravage humanity.

God willing, this paper will trigger a thousand, or even ten thousand, scientists and engineers to develop overunity energy devices. If so, shortly we can rid our biosphere of noxious automobile and factory exhausts, radioactive nuclear wastes, and massive oil spills. We can remove many of the hydrocarbon combustion pollutants from the air, stop acid rain and the destruction of our forests, and stop the steady rise of carbon monoxide in our air. If that truly tends toward a "Greenhouse" effect, then we can halt that effect as well.

The Creator has always given us bountiful free electrical energy, everywhere, easily and readily for the simple taking. It has only been our own blindness and folly that have prevented us from seeing and using this free energy bounty.

So here is the final secret of abundant, free electrical energy. Please use the knowledge well and see that its benefits also accrue to those impoverished ones who need it so desperately. Remember the adage, "Inasmuch as you have done it to these little ones..."

This is for those little ones. You are our brothers and sisters. We want you to live. And we want you to have a better quality of life, not just bare existence. We care.

Tom Bearden

read on...

THE FINAL SECRET OF FREE ENERGY

CNN on CFR & North American Union

2007-03-05T07:37:00.000-08:00

Colombia's Other Coke Problem

2007-03-03T20:46:00.000-08:00

Coke’s refusal to assist an independent investigation into it’s union-busting in Colombia has caused the New York University to ban Coke products – the University of Michigan expected to do the same in a few days. Coca-Cola denies to be working with the Colombian Army’s death squads.

Colombia killings cause Coca-Cola ban

[Maria Engqvist, ANNCOL] US Student activists want Coke to agree to an independent third-party probe of labor violations at its Colombian bottling plants. More than 130 colleges and universities around the world have anti-Coke programs in place, and at least 20 either have banned Coke products or axed exclusive contracts. In early December, the largest private school in USA, New York University, banned Coke products. More are preparing to follow suit, including the University of Michigan on Dec. 31, according to the New York-based Campaign to Stop Killer Coke.

This initiative is part of an international campaign launched three years ago by the Colombian food and beverages union SINALTRAINAL. Since 1989 at least 8 union leaders from Coca-Cola plants in Colombia have been murdered and others have been abducted and tortured. The attacks against the union activists are usually accompanied by threats to all Coca-Cola employees to quit their union.

In a statement received by ANNCOL, the National Executive of SINALTRAINAL, Edgar Paez, says his union wants “reparation for the victims, a change in policy, and a condemnation of those responsible for the terror and crimes that sought to finish off SINALTRAINAL completely.”

According to Paez, a case against Coca-Cola in the US Federal Court, for crimes committed against the people of Colombia, is also “advancing in a very significant manner”.

The efforts come as Coke is attempting to jumpstart cola sales by rebuilding its image to become more relevant and cool. Its new "Welcome to the Coke Side of Life" ad campaign is due next year. The controversy "is the flipside of being a big brand," Coke spokesperson Kari Bjorhus told Brandweek. Coke is flatly denying that it bears responsibility for troubles at the Colombian plant.

The Colombian union says Coke bears responsibility together with the Colombian government for killing unionists demanding fair working conditions. SINALTRAINAL attorney Pedro Mahecha Avila told US media that: "the evidence of state complicity includes not only the impunity with which crimes are committed, but also the use of the military and courts to harass the union with unwarranted searches and false charges."

Mexifornia, Five Years Later

2007-02-27T20:36:00.000-08:00

Mexifornia, Five Years Later

Victor Davis Hanson

The flood of illegal immigrants into California has made things worse than I foresaw.

In the Spring 2002 issue of City Journal, I wrote an essay about growing up in the central San Joaquin Valley and witnessing firsthand, especially over the last 20 years, the ill effects of illegal immigration (City Journal’s editors chose the title of the piece: “Do We Want Mexifornia?”). Controversy over my blunt assessment of the disaster of illegal immigration from Mexico led to an expanded memoir, Mexifornia, published the following year by Encounter Press.

Mexifornia came out during the ultimately successful campaign to recall California governor Gray Davis in autumn 2003. A popular public gripe was that the embattled governor had appeased both employers and the more radical Hispanic politicians of the California legislature on illegal immigration. And indeed Davis had signed legislation allowing driver’s licenses for illegal aliens that both houses of state government had passed. So it was no wonder that the book sometimes found its way into both the low and high forms of the political debate. On the Internet, a close facsimile of a California driver’s license circulated, with a picture of a Mexican bandit (the gifted actor Alfonso Bedoya of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), together with a demeaning height (5’4”), weight (“too much”), and sex (“mucho”) given. “Mexifornia” was emblazoned across the top where “California” usually is stamped on the license.

In such a polarized climate, heated debates and several radio interviews followed, often with the query, “Why did you have to write this book?” The Left saw the book’s arguments and its title—Mexifornia was originally a term of approbation used by activists buoyed by California’s changing demography—as unduly harsh to newcomers from Mexico. The Right saw the book as long-overdue attention to a scandal ignored by the mainstream Republican Party.

Fast-forward nearly five years, and the national climate has radically changed, so much so that the arguments of Mexifornia—close the borders, return to the melting pot, offer earned citizenship to most aliens of long residence in exchange for acceptance of English and American culture—seem tame today, if not passé. In 2002, when I wrote the original City Journal essay, no one thought that the U.S. Congress would vote to erect a wall. Today there is rumbling that the signed legislation entails only 700 miles of fencing instead of spanning the entire 1,950-mile border.

Deportation was once an unimaginable response to the problem of the 11 million here illegally. Now its practicality, rather than its morality, appears the keener point of contention. And the concerted effort by Chicano activists to drive from popular parlance the descriptive term “illegal alien” in favor of the politically correct, but imprecise and often misleading “undocumented worker” has largely failed. Similar efforts to demonize opponents of open borders as “anti-immigrant” or “nativist” have had only a marginal effect in stifling debate, as has the deliberate effort to blur illegal and legal immigration. The old utopian talk of a new borderless zone of dual cultures, spreading on both sides of a disappearing boundary, has given way to a reexamination of NAFTA and its facilitation of greater cross-border flows of goods, services—and illegal aliens and drugs.

So why has the controversy over illegal immigration moved so markedly to the right?

We return always to the question of numbers. While it is true that no one knows exactly how many are here illegally from Mexico and Latin America, both sides in the debate often accept as reasonable estimates of 11 to 12 million illegals—with an additional 500,000 to 1 million arriving per year. Given porous borders, such guesses about the number of illegal aliens in the United States are outdated almost as soon as they are published. It is plausible, then, that there may be an additional 3 to 4 million illegal aliens here who were not here when the City Journal “Mexifornia” piece appeared.

The result of such staggering numbers is that aliens now don’t just cluster in the American Southwest but frequently appear at Home Depot parking lots in the Midwest, emergency rooms in New England, and construction sites in the Carolinas, making illegal immigration an American, rather than a mere Californian or Arizonan, concern.

Indeed, we forget how numbers are at the crux of the entire debate over illegal immigration. In the 1970s, perhaps a few million illegals resided in the United States, and their unassimilated presence went largely unnoticed. Most Americans felt that the formidable powers of integration and popular culture would continue to incorporate any distinctive ethnic enclave, as they had so successfully done with the past generations that arrived en masse from Europe, Asia, and Latin America. But when more than 10 million fled Mexico in little over a decade—the great majority poor, without English, job skills, a high school education, and legality—entire apartheid communities in the American Southwest began springing up.

During the heyday of multiculturalism and political correctness in the 1980s, the response of us, the hosts, to this novel challenge was not to insist upon the traditional assimilation of the newcomer but rather to accommodate the illegal alien with official Spanish-language documents, bilingual education, and ethnic boosterism in our media, politics, and education. These responses only encouraged more illegals to come, on the guarantee that their material life could be better and yet their culture unchanged in the United States. We now see the results. Los Angeles is today the second-largest Mexican city in the world; one out of every ten Mexican nationals resides in the United States, the vast majority illegally.

Since Mexifornia appeared, the debate also no longer splits along liberal/conservative, Republican/Democrat, or even white/brown fault lines. Instead, class considerations more often divide Americans on the issue. The majority of middle-class and poor whites, Asians, African-Americans, and Hispanics wish to close the borders. They see few advantages to cheap service labor, since they are not so likely to need it to mow their lawns, watch their kids, or clean their houses. Because the less well-off eat out less often, use hotels infrequently, and don’t periodically remodel their homes, the advantages to the economy of inexpensive, off-the-books illegal-alien labor again are not so apparent.

But the downside surely is apparent. Truck drivers, carpenters, janitors, and gardeners— unlike lawyers, doctors, actors, writers, and professors—correctly feel that their jobs are threatened, or at least their wages lowered, by cheaper rival workers from Oaxaca or Jalisco. And Americans who live in communities where thousands of illegal aliens have arrived en masse more likely lack the money to move when Spanish-speaking students flood the schools and gangs proliferate. Poorer Americans of all ethnic backgrounds take for granted that poverty provides no exemption from mastering English, so they wonder why the same is not true for incoming Mexican nationals. Less than a mile from my home is a former farmhouse whose new owner moved in several stationary Winnebagos, propane tanks, and outdoor cooking facilities—and apparently four or five entire families rent such facilities right outside his back door. Dozens live where a single family used to—a common sight in rural California that reifies illegal immigration in a way that books and essays do not.

The problem with all this is that our now-spurned laws were originally intended to ensure an (admittedly thin) veneer of civilization over innate chaos—roads full of drivers who have passed a minimum test to ensure that they are not a threat to others; single-family residence zoning to ensure that there are adequate sewer, garbage, and water services for all; periodic county inspections to ensure that untethered dogs are licensed and free of disease and that housing is wired and plumbed properly to prevent mayhem; and a consensus on school taxes to ensure that there are enough teachers and classrooms for such sudden spikes in student populations.

All these now-neglected or forgotten rules proved costly to the taxpayer. In my own experience, the slow progress made in rural California since the 1950s of my youth—in which the county inspected our farm’s rural dwellings, eliminated the once-ubiquitous rural outhouse, shut down substandard housing, and fined violators in hopes of providing a uniform humane standard of residence for all rural residents—has been abandoned in just a few years of laissez-faire policy toward illegal aliens. My own neighborhood is reverting to conditions common about 1950, but with the insult of far higher tax rates added to the injury of nonexistent enforcement of once-comprehensive statutes. The government’s attitude at all levels is to punish the dutiful citizen’s misdemeanors while ignoring the alien’s felony, on the logic that the former will at least comply while the latter either cannot or will not.

Fairness about who is allowed into the United States is another issue that reflects class divides—especially when almost 70 percent of all immigrants, legal and illegal, arrive from Mexico alone. Asians, for example, are puzzled as to why their relatives wait years for official approval to enter the United States, while Mexican nationals come across the border illegally, counting on serial amnesties to obtain citizenship.

These class divisions cut both ways, and they help explain the anomaly of the Wall Street Journal op-ed page mandarins echoing the arguments of the elite Chicano studies professors. Both tend to ridicule the far less affluent Minutemen and English-only activists, in part because they do not experience firsthand the problems associated with illegal immigration but instead find millions of aliens grist for their own contrasting agendas. Indeed, every time an alien crosses the border legally, fluent in English and with a high school diploma, the La Raza industry and the corporate farm or construction company alike most likely lose a constituent.

The ripples of September 11—whether seen in the arrests of dozens of potential saboteurs here in America or the terrorist bombings abroad in Madrid and London—remind Americans that their present enemies can do us harm only if they can first somehow enter the United States. Again, it makes little sense to screen tourists, inspect cargo containers, and check the passenger lists of incoming flights, when our border with an untrustworthy Mexico remains porous. While it may be true that the opponents of illegal immigration have used the post–September 11 fear of terrorism to further their own agenda of closing the border with Mexico, they are absolutely correct that presently the best way for jihadist cells to cross into the United States is overland from the south.

Other foreign developments have also steered the debate ever more rightward. In the last decade, the United States has clearly seen the wages of sectarianism and ethnic chauvinism abroad. The unraveling of Yugoslavia into Croatian, Serbian, and Albanian sects followed the Hutu-Tutsi bloodbath in Rwanda. And now almost daily we hear of Pashtun-Tajik-Uzbek hatred among the multiplicity of warring clans in Afghanistan and the daily mayhem among Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis in Iraq. Why—when we are spending blood and treasure abroad to encourage the melting pot and national unity—would anyone wish to contribute to tribalism or foster the roots of such ethnic separatism here in the United States?

Moreover, all during the 1990s, blue-state America offered up the European Union as the proper postmodern antidote to the United States. But just as we have recoiled from the EU’s statist and undemocratic tendencies—which have resulted in popular dissatisfaction, sluggish economic growth, high unemployment, falling demography, and unsustainable entitlement commitments—so, too, have its unassimilated Muslim minorities served as another canary in the mine. The riots in France, the support for jihadism among Pakistanis in London, and the demands of Islamists in Scandinavia, Germany, and the Netherlands do not encourage Americans to let in more poor Mexican illegal immigrants with loud agendas, or to embrace the multicultural salad bowl over their own distinctive melting pot.

Then there were the April–May 2006 demonstrations here in the United States, when nearly half a million protesters took to the streets of our largest cities, from Chicago to Los Angeles. Previously, naive Americans had considered that their own discussions over border security and immigration were in their own hands. And while Chicano-rights organizations and employer lobbyists were often vehement in their efforts to keep the border open, illegal aliens themselves used to be mostly quiet about our internal legal debates.

In contrast, this spring Americans witnessed millions of illegal aliens who not only were unapologetic about their illegal status but were demanding that their hosts accommodate their own political grievances, from providing driver’s licenses to full amnesty. The largest demonstrations—held on May Day, with thousands of protesters waving Mexican flags and bearing placards depicting the communist insurrectionist Che Guevara—only confirmed to most Americans that illegal immigration was out of control and beginning to become politicized along the lines of Latin American radicalism. I chronicled in Mexifornia the anomaly of angry protesters waving the flag of the country they vehemently did not wish to return to, but now the evening news beamed these images to millions. In short, the radical socialism of Latin America, seething in the angry millions who flocked to support Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and Mexico’s Andrés López Obrador, had now seemingly been imported into our own largest cities.

Turmoil in areas of Mexico that send many illegal aliens to the United States is especially worrisome. Recently, for example, almost the entire state of Oaxaca was in near-open revolt over efforts to force the resignation of provincial governor Ulises Ruiz. There was widespread lawlessness, vigilantism, and at times the complete breakdown of order. All this feeds the growing perception that illegal aliens increasingly are arriving not merely as economic refugees but as political dissidents who don’t hesitate to take to the streets here to demand social justice, as they did back home.

More important still, Oaxaca’s troubles cast doubt on the conventional wisdom that illegal immigration is a safety valve that allows Mexico critical time to get its house in order. Perhaps the opposite is true: some of the areas, like Oaxaca, that send the most illegal aliens to the United States, still experience the greatest social tensions—in part because of the familial disruption and social chaos that results when adult males flee and depopulated communities consequently become captive to foreign remittances.

Two further issues have persuaded Americans to close the borders: the attitude of the Mexican government and the problems with first-generation native-born children of illegal aliens.

Worker remittances sent back to Mexico now earn it precious American dollars equal to the revenue from 500,000 barrels of daily exported oil. In short, Mexico cannot afford to lose its second-largest source of hard currency and will do almost anything to ensure its continuance. When Mexico City publishes comic books advising its own citizens how best to cross the Rio Grande, Americans take offense. Not only does Mexico brazenly wish to undermine American law to subsidize its own failures, but it also assumes that those who flee northward are among its least educated, departing without much ability to read beyond the comic-book level.

We are also learning not only that Mexico wants its expatriates’ cash—and its nationals lobbying for Mexican interests—once they are safely away from their motherland; we are also discovering that Mexico doesn’t have much concern about the welfare of its citizens abroad in America. The conservative estimate of $15 billion sent home comes always at the expense of low-paid Mexicans toiling here, who must live in impoverished circumstances if they are to send substantial portions of their wages home to Mexico. (And it comes as well at the expense of American taxpayers, providing health-care and food subsidies in efforts to offer a safety net to cash-strapped illegal aliens.) So it is not just that Mexico exports its own citizens, but it does so on the expectation that they are serfs of a sort, who, like the helots of old, surrender much of the earnings of their toil to their distant masters.

But even more grotesquely, in the last five years, the Mexican real-estate market has boomed on the Baja California peninsula. Once Mexico grasped that its own unspoiled coast was highly desirable for wealthy expatriate Americans as a continuation of the prized but crowded Santa Barbara–San Diego seaside corridor, it began to reform its real-estate market, making the necessary changes in property and title law, and it welcomed with open arms cash-laden subdividers looking to come south. This is sound economics, but examine the ethical message: Mexico City will send the United States millions of its own illiterate and poor whom it will neither feed nor provide with even modest housing, but at the same time it welcomes thousands of Americans with cash to build expensive seaside second homes.

Of course, the ultimate solution to the illegal immigration debacle is for Mexican society to bring itself up to the levels of affluence found in the United States by embracing market reforms of the sort we have seen in South Korea, Taiwan, and China. But rarely do Mexican supporters of such globalization, or their sympathetic counterparts in the United States, see the proliferation of a Wal-Mart or Starbucks down south in such terms. Rather, to them American consumerism and investment in Mexico suggest only an owed reciprocity of sentiment: Why should Americans get mad about Mexican illegals coming north when our own crass culture, with its blaring neon signs in English, spreads southward? In such morally equivalent arguments, it is never mentioned that Americanization occurs legally and brings capital, while Mexicanization comes about by illegal means and is driven by poverty.

At the same time, focus has turned more to the U.S.-born children of Mexican illegal immigrants, in whom illegitimacy, school dropout rates, and criminal activity have risen to such levels that no longer can we simply dismiss Mexican immigration as resembling the more problematic but eventually successful Italian model of a century ago. Then, large numbers of southern European Catholics, most without capital and education, arrived en masse from Italy and Sicily, lived in ethnic enclaves, and for decades lagged behind the majority population in educational achievement, income, and avoidance of crime—before achieving financial parity as well as full assimilation and intermarriage. Since 1990, the number of poor Mexican-Americans has climbed 52 percent, a figure that skewed U.S. poverty rates. Billions of dollars spent on our own poor will not improve our poverty statistics when 1 million of the world’s poorest cross our border each year. The number of impoverished black children has dropped 17 percent in the last 16 years, but the number of Hispanic poor has gone up 43 percent. We don’t like to talk of illegitimacy, but here again the ripples of illegal immigration reach the U.S.-born generation. Half of births to Hispanic-Americans were illegitimate, 42 percent higher than the general rate of the American population. Illegitimacy is higher in general in Mexico than in the United States, but the force multiplier of illegal status, lack of English, and an absence of higher education means that the children of Mexican immigrants have illegitimacy rates even higher than those found in either Mexico or the United States.

Education levels reveal the same dismal pattern—nearly half of all Hispanics are not graduating from high school in four years. And the more Hispanic a school district becomes, the greater level of failure for Hispanic students. In the Los Angeles district, 73 percent Hispanic, 60 percent of the students are not graduating. But the real tragedy is that, of those Hispanics who do graduate, only about one in five will have completed a high school curriculum that qualifies for college enrollment. That partly helps to explain why at many campuses of the California State University system, almost half of the incoming class must first take remedial education. Less than 10 percent of those who identify themselves as Hispanic have graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree. I found that teaching Latin to first-generation Mexican-Americans and illegal aliens was valuable not so much as an introduction to the ancient world but as their first experience with remedial English grammar.

Meanwhile, almost one in three Mexican-American males between the ages of 18 and 24 recently reported being arrested, one in five has been jailed, and 15,000 illegal aliens are currently in the California penal system.

Statistics like these have changed the debate radically. While politicians and academics assured the public that illegal aliens came here only to work and would quickly assume an American identity, the public’s own ad hoc and empirical observations of vast problems with crime, illiteracy, and illegitimacy have now been confirmed by hard data. Ever since the influx of illegals into our quiet valley became a flood, I have had five drivers leave the road, plow into my vineyard, and abandon their cars, without evidence of either registration or insurance. On each occasion, I have seen them simply walk or run away from the scene of thousands of dollars in damage. Similarly, an intoxicated driver who ran a stop sign hit my car broadside and then fled the scene. Our farmhouse in the Central Valley has been broken into three times. We used to have an open yard; now it is walled, with steel gates on the driveway. Such anecdotes have become common currency in the American Southwest. Ridiculed by elites as evidence of prejudice, these stories, statistical studies now show, reflect hard fact.

The growing national discomfort over illegal immigration more than four years after “Mexifornia” first appeared in City Journal is not only apparent in the rightward shift of the debate but also in the absence of any new arguments for open borders—while the old arguments, Americans are finally concluding, really do erode the law, reward the cynical here and abroad, and needlessly divide Americans along class, political, and ethnic lines.

North American Union "Conspiracy" Exposed

2007-02-23T10:50:00.000-08:00

The North American Union "Conspiracy" Exposed

By Cliff Kincaid

Ironically, however, he said that the development of a North American legal system might in some way assist in cleaning up the Mexican legal system.

A top Democratic Party foreign policy specialist said on Friday that a "very small group" of conservatives is unfairly accusing him of being at the center of a "vast conspiracy" to implement the idea of a "North American Union" by "stealth." He called the charges "absurd."

But Robert Pastor, a former official of the Carter Administration and director of the Center for North American Studies at American University (CNAS), made the remarks at an all-day February 16 conference devoted to the development of a North American legal system. The holding of the conference was itself evidence that a comprehensive process is underway to merge the economies, and perhaps the social and political systems, of the three countries.

Pastor said that he favors a "North American Community," not a formal union of the three countries, and several speakers at the conference ridiculed the idea of protecting America's borders and suggested that American citizenship was an outmoded concept.

Wearing a lapel pin featuring the flags of the U.S., Canada and Mexico, Pastor told AIM that he favors a $200-billion North American Investment Fund to pull Mexico out of poverty and a national biometric identity card for the purpose of controlling the movement of people in and out of the U.S.

So the "conspiracy" is now very much out in the open, if only the media would pay some attention to it.

Media Cover-Up

Accuracy in Media attended the conference in order to produce this report and shed light on a process that is being conducted largely beyond the scrutiny of the public or the Congress.

AIM has previously documented that Pastor's campaign for a North American Community has received precious little attention from the major media, except for the notable case of CNN's Lou Dobbs, who has called it "utterly mad." In fact, a survey of news coverage discloses that several high-profile mentions of the concept of a North American economic, social or political entity have come from Pastor himself, such as a Newsweek International article that he wrote.

The conference, conducted in cooperation with the American Society of International Law, an organization affiliated with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, was held at the American University Washington College of Law. A large number of speakers came from American University.

Overruling the U.S. Supreme Court

Academic literature distributed in advance to conference participants about a common legal framework for the U.S., Canada and Mexico included proposals for a North American Court of Justice (with the authority to overrule a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court), a North American Trade Tribunal, a North American Court of Justice, and a Charter of Fundamental Human Rights for North America, also dubbed the North American Social Charter.

Under the latter concept, according to Laura Spitz of the University of Colorado Law School, North Americans might be able to enjoy "new rights" essential to "human flourishing" such as gay marriage. She argues in one paper that U.S. economic integration with Canada will make it nearly impossible for the United States not to recognize same-sex marriage so long as it is lawful in Canada.

Pastor himself talked about new institutions, such as a "permanent tribunal" on trade issues, but emphasized that such ideas "take time" and have to "take root." He advised conference participants to "think about the horizon," in terms of what is possible, over the course of 5, 10 or even 20 years from now.

Conservative concerns about Pastor's agenda were not assuaged by conference literature disclosing that the CNAS is sponsoring an event in May in which students participate in a model "North American Parliament." The concept suggests creation of a regional body to supersede the U.S. Government itself.

Such talk does indeed raise the specter of a North American Union similar to the currently functioning European Union, a political and economic entity of 27 European states that includes a European Parliament and a European Court of Justice. The EU has been charged with usurping the sovereignty of member states and moving European nations in a left-wing direction on matters such as acceptance of abortion and gay rights and abolition of the death penalty.

Indeed, the academic literature distributed to conference participants alluded to how the three countries of North America are "polarized" on "sensitive" cultural issues such as the death penalty, abortion and gay marriage and that it might take a long time to "harmonize" their legal systems on such matters.

While Pastor, a foreign policy advisor to each of the Democratic presidential candidates since 1976, tried to dismiss talk of a North American Union, he did emphasize in his remarks to the conference that North America is "more than a geographical entity" and is in fact a "community." His 2001 book, Toward a North American Community, begins by emphasizing his status as a resident of North America, rather than just a U.S. citizen, and outlines a vision of the three countries taking their relationship "to a new level."

Rather than use the phrase "union," he described the creation of an "emerging entity called North America" growing out of the fact that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), passed in 1993, had brought about a "remarkable degree of economic integration" among the three countries. One panel was devoted to analyzing how NAFTA could be expanded into the areas of intellectual property and taxation and regulations.

Attacking Conservatives

One speaker, Stephen Zamora of the University of Houston Law School, denounced the idea of a wall separating Mexico and the U.S., in order to control illegal immigration, asking, "What does citizenship mean anymore?" He expressed pleasant surprise when a Mexican in the audience said she had dual citizenship in Mexico and the U.S. Later, he said he was just as concerned about people living in Mexico as people living in the U.S.

Another speaker, Tom Farer, Dean of the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver, made a point of saying that his representative in Congress, Tom Tancredo (R-Col.), a staunch advocate of U.S. border security, was a backward thinker. Tancredo could be seen "dragging his knuckles along the ground," Farer said, trying to crack a joke.

No Border Control

Pastor acknowledged that the U.S. Government doesn't want to enforce its immigration laws. He said, however, that the solution is not a fence, except in some isolated high-crime areas along the border, and it's not to punish companies for hiring illegal aliens, since identity documents can be too easily forged. He said the solution is a national biometric and fraud-proof identification card that identifies national origin and legal status.

Another part of his solution, a $200-billion North American Investment Fund, is for the purpose of narrowing the income disparity between Mexico, on the one hand, and the U.S. and Canada, on the other. "You need a lot of money to do it and do it effectively," he said. He said Mexico would be required to put up half of the money, with the U.S. contributing 40 percent and Canada 10 percent. It would be done over 10 years.

The fund, he said, would focus on economic development in the southern and middle parts of Mexico, which haven't been touched to any significant degree by NAFTA. This, he indicated, would go a long way toward stemming illegal immigration to the U.S.

So the failures of NAFTA are now being used not to repeal the measure but to expand it and increase foreign aid to Mexico.

Pastor said Senator John Cornyn, known as a conservative Republican, had introduced his North American Investment Fund as a bill in Congress but had backed away from it under conservative fire.

The Nature of NAFTA

An important moment in the conference occurred when Alan Tarr, director of the Center for State Constitutional Studies at Rutgers University, was challenged about glossing over President Clinton's submission of NAFTA as an agreement, requiring only a majority of votes in both Houses of Congress for passage, and not a treaty, requiring a two-thirds vote in favor in the Senate. NAFTA passed by votes of 234-200 in the House and 61-38 in the Senate. Tarr said he had not intended to be uncritical of what Clinton did. Pastor quickly interjected that there was nothing improper in submitting NAFTA as an agreement rather than a treaty.

But Clinton's move was seen at the time as an effort to bypass constitutional processes, and the United Steelworkers challenged NAFTA's constitutionality in court. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2001, after lower courts had thrown the case out, saying it was a political matter between the president and Congress. The Bush Administration sided with Clinton and the Supreme Court declined to get involved.

The history of NAFTA is one reason why so many conservatives are concerned that a North American Community could be transformed into a North American Union that runs roughshod over U.S. constitutional processes and guarantees.

One of the main concerns of conservatives, who have formed a "Coalition to Block the North American Union," has been the lack of congressional interest and oversight. They are backing a bill introduced by Rep. Virgil Goode (R-Va.) to put Congress on record against a North American Union.

The Secretive SPP

Another major concern is that the Bush Administration has facilitated the creation of this new North American "entity" through an initiative known as the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), based on a memorandum signed by President Bush and the leaders of Canada and Mexico in March 2005. It is described as "a trilateral effort to increase security and enhance prosperity among the United States, Canada and Mexico through greater cooperation and information sharing," but its "working groups" have been operating in secret and many of the members are not even known.

Judicial Watch, a conservative public-interest law firm, had to go through the Freedom of Information Act to obtain documents naming the members of some of the mysterious working groups.

Officially, on the U.S. side, the SPP is coordinated by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, and Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez.

The Clinton Connection

Pastor's luncheon speaker, Eric Farnsworth, the Vice-President of the Council of the Americas, provided some valuable insight into this process. Saying NAFTA is "no longer enough," he described the SPP as designed to help North America meet the economic challenges posed by such countries as China and India.

Farnsworth said that the Council of the Americas, which advises the SPP, would shortly issue 300 recommendations designed to improve business conditions in the U.S., Mexico and Canada. He was unclear as to whether the U.S. Government would try to implement these initiatives on its own, through the administrative or regulatory process, or whether they would be submitted to Congress for approval.

The Council's honorary chairman is David Rockefeller and its board members come from such major corporations as Merck, PepsiCo, McDonald's, Ford, Citibank, IBM, Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil, GE (which owns NBC News and MSNBC) and Time Warner (which owns CNN and Time Inc.).

One of the key board members is Thomas F. McLarty III, President of Kissinger McLarty Associates, who served as Clinton's White House counselor and chief of staff during the time that NAFTA was signed and passed by Congress. McLarty, who also functioned as Special Envoy to the Americas under Clinton, is an adviser to the Carlyle Group, focusing on "buyout investment opportunities in Mexico."

Farnsworth mentioned the possible creation of a "super-national Supreme Court" governing business and trade issues in North America, but was ambiguous about whether it would ever come to pass.

A self-described Democrat who served as policy director in the Clinton White House Office of the Special Envoy for the Americas from 1995-98, he also said that he was optimistic that Bush would strike a deal with the new Democratic-controlled Congress on immigration. He said Bush was "at odds with his own party" on immigration and that legislation to create a so-called "guest worker" program could pass now that Republicans have lost control of Congress.

The Panama Canal Giveaway

For his part, Pastor, a friendly and engaging fellow who talks about his ideas at length with critics, has a history that goes far beyond deep personal involvement in the Democratic Party.

Pastor is associated by conservatives with President Jimmy Carter's treaty, opposed by then-presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, which transferred control of the Panama Canal away from the U.S. to the Panamanian government. Pastor was National Security Advisor for Latin America under Carter. His nomination as U.S. Ambassador to Panama was withdrawn in 1995 after conservative Senator Jesse Helms, then-chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, threatened to block a vote on his nomination. Helms accused Pastor of aiding radical forces and undermining U.S. interests in the region.

The founding director of the Latin American and Caribbean Program of the [Jimmy] Carter Center, Pastor became Vice President of International Affairs and Professor of International Relations at American University on September 1, 2002, when he created his Center for North American Studies. Pastor also served as vice chair of a Council on Foreign Relations Task Force on the Future of North America, which issued a report in May 2005. Lately, Pastor's Center for North American Studies has received funding from the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean to address "regulatory convergence" issues.

A sour note about the prospect of further integration with Mexico was provided at the conference by Alberto Szekely, a career ambassador and advisor to the Mexican Minister of Foreign Affairs, who said that the rule of law simply does not exist in Mexico and that corruption permeates governmental institutions. He said reforms under the presidency of Vicente Fox went nowhere and that Mexico is one of the most corrupt countries in the world today.

Ironically, however, he said that the development of a North American legal system might in some way assist in cleaning up the Mexican legal system.

Pastor, an optimist about the prospect of developing the North American Community, told me that he didn't think the situation in Mexico was as bleak as Szekely made it out to be. He continues to be a proponent of "continental thinking."

Cliff Kincaid is editor of the Accuracy in Media (AIM) Report. This article may be reproduced if credit is given and a link provided to www.aim.org

Extraordinary Silver Pajamas

2007-02-19T09:55:00.000-08:00

Al Korelin at kereport.com quizzically notes that the statistics show that the supply of silver has actually been higher than the demand. Instead of shrugging his shoulders at the anomaly and moving on (like I would have done to avoid the actual work of research), he takes positive action to solve the mystery, and calls David Morgan of The Morgan Report to remark upon the table of the historical supply/demand on the Kitco Silver site, and says to him, "I don't get it; Kitco is well-known for accurate statistics and this one makes no sense."

The explanation was obtained when Mr. Morgan revealed, "these statistics were obtained from Goldfield Mineral Services from the United Kingdom, and of the three components making up the supply numbers, government sales and scrap supply, often known as 'above ground supply' are somewhat open to conjecture. The only component, which cannot be questioned, is 'mine supply', and there is a deficit between mine supply and total demand. This fact, coupled with the growing medical and industrial demand for silver, is one of the reasons that the price of the commodity is increasing." Nice analysis, Mr. Morgan!

And perhaps one of the new "growing medical demands" for silver to which he alluded is reported by Mineweb.com, in that "Pioneering pajamas and bed linen made with silver cloth could prove the key to limiting MRSA (a bacteria which has caused a number of illnesses and deaths to patients in U.K. hospitals) infections if a multi-centre trial being run by St Bartholomews Hospital in London and The London NHS Trust proves successful. Dr Peter Wilson, a Consultant Microbiologist at the Trust,
believes there is strong anecdotal evidence to suggest that silver can be used to clear MRSA on the skin and therefore protect vulnerable patients."

Everybody concerned says that they are "excited" about the study, hopefully to verify the theory that they could actually eradicate the infection horror of almost-incurable MRSA by giving (oops, "selling at hugely obscene mark-ups") pajamas laced with silver to hospital patients.

And as a guy who owns some silver, I am likewise "excited" about this research, as this means a whole new, huge demand at the exact same time since the decades-long government selling of stockpiles of silver (and other things) into the market are almost gone! It's "perfect storm" time!

Suddenly, since demand already exceeds supply (and has for years), that old supply-versus-demand thing pops unbidden into my head, and the result is so compelling that, next thing I know I am screaming to the family to clean out their closets because I'm going to need the storage space for a lot more silver!

Predictably, because they are not "team players", I can hear them grumbling and cursing under their breath that they are already storing so much silver that the only closet space they have left is just big enough for a change of rags, which, according to my calculations (when I add the set of rags they are currently wearing), is two sets of rags apiece. What riches!

"Why do they dress in rags?" you ask. "Because," I patiently explain to you, like I patiently explain it them, and like I patiently explain it to those pesky, busybody social workers with their precious little court orders in their fat, greasy little hands, "they are just too damned lazy to beg or steal some clothes from the neighbors, much less get up off their lazy butts to go down to the Salvation Army, and get something nicer to wear! The clothes are free! I mean, I could have dropped them off, on my way to play golf, almost any morning of the week! So shut the hell up
and take those handcuffs off of me, you damned dirty apes!"

This was, of course, my clever way of trying to de-fuse the tense situation by adding some humorous allusion to Charleton Heston's famous line in Planet of the Apes, and which was, of course, not appreciated by the Gestapo apes, both onscreen and in my real life. Although I note with a dismissive sneer that Charleton Heston didn't have to pay bankrupting fines or attend stupid classes on "How to be a Good Father" and "Anger Management"; instead he got a nice, cozy cage to live in, free grub, free
medical care, and hot chicks half his age, dressed in hubba-hubba shortie outfits, brought to him for some XXX-rated Hot Monkey Love! I mean, where's the justice? I'm the freaking victim here!

But this is not about how the legal system isn't about "justice", or even about cheerless government goons. It is about how, if this study about silver pajamas preventing MRSA in hospitals proves effective, you can bet your sweet butteroo that this kind of clothing will soon be selling like hotcakes in Wal-Mart, to worried, germ-o-phobic mothers all over the world. And that kind of huge demand for silver, to meet the tidal wave of demand, means that silver (as I can not even fathom the remotest possibility otherwise) must be preparing to go to the moon in price!
Wheee!

Then, according to the Secret Mogambo Five-Year Plan (SMFYP), I'll take some of the silver from storage in their stupid closets (giving them back their stupid closet space), sell the silver, get rich with cash, give the wife and the kids a few bucks apiece, and tell them to, "Hit the road, ya hateful parasites, always dragging me down!" As Hannibal Smith (played by George Peppard) of the A-Team so famously said, "I love it when a plan comes together!"

The famous Daan Joubert sent me an email that did not actually contain the phrase, "you are the biggest idiot in the whole world", but I could tell that that was what he was really thinking when he replied to an item from last week's MoGu, in which Paul van Eeden proposed that "real interest rate equals nominal interest rate minus M3 growth minus inflation", which Mr. Joubert suggests "needs an adjustment."

Reading between the lines, you can plainly see that he is calling me, like so many others have called me, "an insignificant little intellectual pygmy", all because I should have realized that "Broadly speaking, M3 growth should be in pace with the growth rate of GDP - nominal rate growth, or else inflation is brought twice into the calculation."

So now I am feeling embarrassed and my feelings are hurt, and I am already beginning to formulate a plan for revenge against the insult, maybe by using that new howitzer cannon that my wife disparaged by saying, "Why did you buy that monstrosity, you Stupid Mogambo Moron (SMM)? You'll never use it!"

But, as they say, "First things first." So let's re-calculate real inflation according to this new methodology! He apparently sees me fumbling with the calculator, stalling for time. And knowing that I will probably get the wrong answer half a dozen times before giving up by crying in despair, he sighs in exasperation and supplies the answer by saying, "the real interest rate is not the negative 7% as you had it, but 'only' say negative 4% to negative 5%."

But the point is that real (inflation-adjusted) interest rates are - wonder to behold! - still negative! Negative interest rates! Too, too weird!

And notice his use of the modifier "only", as in, "We originally thought a horrible disease was going to kill you in two weeks, and now we see that it is ONLY going to kill you in three weeks!" Hahaha!

I like my little joke so much that I have decided not to persecute Mr. Joubert, mostly because he has a very good point, but also because I am a wonderful peach of a guy, and only (again with the "only"!) partially because the enormous cost of shipping one lousy howitzer cannon would make you plotz. It sure did me!

But, being naturally argumentative, I like the idea (now that he has pointed it out) of double-counting some of the inflations by subtracting actual price inflation (which is inflation that has already happened to prices) from the nominal interest rate, and yet still subtracting the current monetary inflation growth in M3, as originally posited, because the future price inflation will certainly lag the current monetary inflation. And future price inflation ought to be relevant to
borrowing /investing plans!

Larry from MoneyandMarkets.com newsletter says he "tore apart the government's 2006 financial statements", and here's what he found: "The actual annual federal deficit for the fiscal year [ending] September 30, 2006 was $4.6 trillion, up from $3.5 trillion a year ago. That's an astounding $1.1 trillion increase, or a 31.4% jump in the deficit." Yow!

This is not to mention that it is more than a third of GDP!

As for the budget (a cash-accounting format), he notes, "The actual deficit is nearly nineteen times larger than the reported $248 billion deficit."

And last, but certainly not least, the accrual-system of accounting shows, "Total federal obligations at year-end were $54.6 trillion, up from $50 trillion in 2005...$46.4 trillion in 2004...and $32.7 trillion in 2002."

Did I say, "We're freaking doomed!" in the last ten minutes? If not, insert said comment here. Maybe with an exclamation point or two to add the emphasis it deserves!

Until next week,

The Mogambo Guru

**** Mogambo sez: Gold, silver and oil should do very well for a long, long time until their prices (and lots of other prices) go parabolic as the dollar finally loses its last remnants of value at a quickly accelerating pace. And this means that every time the price goes down, you should buy some more, or have a really good reason why not, because you will soon be asking yourself, "Why didn't I buy gold, silver and oil when I knew I should have? What am I, some kind of moron?"

The answer is, of course, "Yes, you are a moron", or else would not be reading this stupid Mogambo Guru article in the first place, doofus. Check and mate!

Class War in Latin America

2007-02-18T12:09:00.000-08:00

Since 1492 the people of Latin America have suffered massive oppression and poverty at the hands of imperialism and capitalism. The last few years, however, have opened up a new period of explosive resistance against the rule of big business.

Workers, youth and peasants throughout the region have been protesting on the streets and at the ballot boxes. The working class is stepping into struggle, and increasingly becoming more anti-capitalist. Even the dreaded “s word,” socialism, is now being discussed and debated in the streets, from Caracas to Mexico City.

In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez was recently swept into a third term with over 60% of the vote. Chavez has consistently been a thorn in the side of U.S. imperialism and Venezuelan capitalism since he was first elected in 1998. They have tried all sorts of dirty tricks to remove him: a recall referendum, massive funding of opposition candidates, and even a military coup. In each attempt the mass of Venezuela’s poor have rose to the occasion to defend Chavez and the Bolivarian revolution.

This latest election represents a further defeat for Washington and its right wing allies. Chavez’s victory will boost the confidence of the working class, and the revolution’s aim of building “socialism in the 21st century.” Already it seems Chavez is moving further to the left, and in early January he announced plans to nationalize Venezuela’s energy and telecommunications industries.

In Brazil, anger at Lula’s abandonment of his socialist principles has led to the development of a new party, the Socialism and Freedom Party (P-SOL). In the presidential elections P-SOL got over 6 million votes, nearly 7%. This starting point will help the development of this new socialist political movement.

Just south of the Rio Grande, in Mexico, the left wing mayor of Mexico City, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) was just barely defeated in the presidential elections. This defeat was widely considered as fraudulent, and mass protests erupted against the massive fraud initiated by the Mexican capitalist class and its candidate Felipe Calderon.

Directly after the electoral theft, AMLO’s supporters occupied Mexico City’s Zocalo Square for 48 days in protest. On November 20, 300,000 showed up in force to protest Calderon’s farcical inauguration. In the halls of the Mexican Congress, where the inauguration was to take place, fistfights broke out between opposition politicians supporting AMLO and those supporting Calderon.

This comes on top of the massive battles that took place in the Oaxaca region. These protests started with a teachers’ strike and culminated in a march of over one million in November. Before it was brutally crushed, the Oaxaca rebellion led to the formation of a popular assembly of workers and ordinary people that took effective control of the region.

The events in Mexico show the willingness of the Latin American working class to go beyond electoral struggles. Throughout the region there have been massive strikes and protests.

In Chile mass protests erupted in opposition to a scheme to privatize education. This attack on education came from a government headed by Michelle Bachelet, a supposed socialist. Mere months after her election over one million students, teachers, medical workers and others came out on strike to protest.

Political tensions have also erupted in Bolivia in recent months. The Bolivian working class has waged a heroic struggle over the last few years mainly around the demands to nationalize the country’s vast oil and natural gas resources. This culminated in the 2005 election of left wing president Evo Morales.

Morales has stoked the anger of Bolivia’s rich landlords and their right wing parties. The city of Cochabamba erupted in protest this November as workers and peasants fought to disrupt a meeting of right wing governors.

Thousands of peasants and indigenous people have been marching hundreds of miles from Santa Cruz to the capital of La Paz picking up people along the way. They are threatening to shut down the Senate if it does not approve modifications to the agrarian reform law that would allow the government to confiscate and redistribute land to indigenous groups.

This mood of struggle and growing class-consciousness has even penetrated the heart of capitalism and imperialism. The immigrant rights movement last year erupted into the biggest mass movement in recent U.S. history. Millions of Latin American immigrant workers chose to stand up to the right wing threats of the Republicans and for the right to live and work with dignity.

This movement culminated in the “day without an immigrant” last spring on May 1. This day of action pointed in the direction of a general strike, as millions of workers walked out of their jobs and shut down numerous businesses and industries in Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago and elsewhere. This movement forced the far right to step back and effectively blocked the vicious Sensenbrenner bill.

These historic struggles are a glimpse into the future, when the working class worldwide will move into struggle for a better world. They have put the idea of socialism back on the political map. They should serve as an inspiration to workers and youth around the globe. These movements show that it is possible to fight back against capitalism and imperialism.

But, socialist policies can not be fulfilled in the name of the working class by well meaning leaders. They are the task of the working class and require its full involvement and leadership. That’s why we support the Committee for a Workers’ International’s call for the creation of new mass workers’ parties. This is a necessary step to end the rule of capitalism and achieve the socialist transformation of society, which alone can transform the lives of workers and the poor across the region.

Presidential Frontrunners Would Surrender America's Borders

2007-02-15T10:51:00.000-08:00

By Pastor Chuck Baldwin | NewsWithViews.com

Looking at the potential presidential frontrunners for both the Democrat and Republican parties reveals that virtually everyone of them would surrender America's borders. Not one of the presidential frontrunners from either party would protect our borders against illegal immigration. Just the opposite. They would continue George Bush's policy of wide open borders, including his determination to grant amnesty to illegals. In other words, when it comes to protecting our borders, there is not a nickel's worth of difference between the two major parties' leading presidential contenders.

Democratic presidential frontrunners include John Edwards, Barak Obama, and Hillary Clinton. Republican frontrunners include John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Rudy Giuliani.

In fact, virtually every Democratic candidate, and even the vast majority of Republican candidates, would provide no relief to America's border problems. And, yes, that includes Sam Brownback and Newt Gingrich. Notable exceptions include Duncan Hunter, Ron Paul, and Tom Tancredo, with Tancredo at the head of the class.

Obviously, should Hunter, Paul, or Tancredo miraculously win the White House, the push for a North American Union (NAU) complete with a NAFTA superhighway and a trilateral, hemispheric government, would be stopped dead in its tracks. For this reason, the GOP machine (and the insiders who control it) will never allow someone such as Duncan Hunter, Ron Paul, or Tom Tancredo to obtain the nomination.

It's time the American people faced a hard, cold reality: no matter who the two major parties nominate in November 2008, the push for open borders, amnesty for illegal aliens, and the NAU will continue unabated. In other words, anyone one believes that unimpeded illegal immigration (and related issues) just might be the biggest threat to our national sovereignty and security (and count me as one who does) will not be able to vote for either the Republican or Democratic nominee in 2008. It's time to start preparing for that reality now.

Does that mean that Republicans should not do everything they can to help Tancredo, Paul, or Hunter gain the nomination? Of course not. If the vast majority of the GOP rank and file would get solidly behind these three men, one of them might have a chance of succeeding. However, the track record of the GOP faithful is not very reassuring.

Instead of supporting principled, uncompromising men of integrity, such as the three men named above, Republican voters will doubtless buy into the party mantra of pragmatism and help nominate another spineless globalist such as currently occupies the White House, which will leave us exactly where we are now.

So, here is the sixty-four million dollar question: What will principled conservative voters do in 2008? My hope and prayer is that after failing to receive their party's nomination, Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo, and Duncan Hunter (or at least one of them) will leave the party and bring their (his) followers to the Constitution Party (CP). In all likelihood, the CP will have ballot access in over 45 states. It is already the third largest political party in the country and is currently the fastest growing political party in the nation. A national leader such as Paul, Tancredo, or Hunter would provide the CP with a very attractive alternative to the globalist candidates being offered by the two major parties.

By nature, I am not a single issue voter. However, I am sensible enough to realize that there are currently a handful of issues that will literally make or break America's future. And right now, the illegal immigration and emerging North American Union issues are at the very top of the list. Further failure on these issues will mean the end of America as we know it. And I mean very soon.

Regardless of what Hunter, Paul, and Tancredo ultimately do, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents who believe we must protect America's borders, stop the burgeoning North American Union, and secure our national sovereignty must be prepared to abandon the two major parties' presidential nominees in 2008 and support an "America First" third party candidate. Even a virtually unknown candidate with limited experience, but someone who understands the issues and has the backbone to do what is right, would be head and shoulders above what the two major parties are currently shoving down our throats.

Better start preparing yourselves for it now, folks.

SuperHighway

2007-02-05T11:00:00.000-08:00