Sunday, June 30, 2013





Thursday, June 27, 2013

Climate Change Garbage




“For the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change. If Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will.”
-- President Obama, State of the Union, February 12, 2013.


President Obama has made good on his promise and issued a climate action plan, which includes directing the EPA to cut carbon pollution from all of our nation's power plants -- the nation’s largest source of climate change-inducing pollution -- for the first time ever. But already, lobbyists for major polluters and their allies in Congress are working to block or weaken his plan.
Help us send an overwhelming message of support for climate action in the next 72 hours. Fill out your information here to join the president in saying, “I will act to protect future generations.”

Your Message






If you care about the future of our children and future generations, you'll stop the reckless spending and quit stealing from them!  You wouldn't dupe them to believe this garbage, as you are not dumb enough to believe that our 'carbon emissions" are effecting the Planet's geological forces that have been taking place for eons, and nothing but a massive meteor can make any kind of significant impact on "Climate Change'.  That is a scientifically proven phenomenon that even this holier than thou administration has no control over.   You are, however, trying to control energy companies, the costs of energy production, and the ability for already struggling Americans to afford it.  It's the same old Regulation Nation agenda that you're pushing to cripple this country. That, Sir, is EVIL.   And your attempts to control the population rather than the problems that this massive government have created with far worse consequences to our children's future is a despicable despotic display of your disdain for all Americans and this Country.  May all that you've inflicted upon others come back to you tenfold.  








-Karma always takes care of Greed infected, Power drunk, Conscienceless Liars.....    ALWAYS

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

White House Offers Stealth Campaign to Support Immigration Bill

 

 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/21/us/politics/stealth-campaign-from-the-white-house-for-an-immigration-bill.html?_r=0

 

White House Offers Stealth Campaign to Support Immigration Bill


Doug Mills/The New York Times
The office where Obama aides are coordinating strategy on overhauling immigration laws.
By
Published: June 20, 2013

WASHINGTON — The hide-out has no sign on the door, but inside Dirksen 201 is a spare suite of offices the White House has transformed into its covert immigration war room on Capitol Hill.

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Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, en route to the Senate. Mr. Corker has been backing a border security amendment.
Strategically located down the hall from the Senate Judiciary Committee in one of the city’s massive Congressional office buildings, the work space normally reserved for the vice president is now the hub of a stealthy legislative operation run by President Obama’s staff. Their goal is to quietly secure passage of the first immigration overhaul in a quarter century.
“We are trying hard not to be heavy handed about what we are doing,” said Cecilia Muñoz, the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council and the president’s point person on immigration.
Six years ago President George W. Bush publicly sent cabinet secretaries to roam the Capitol building daily to try to woo Republican senators for a similar immigration bill. But this time, high-profile help from the White House is anathema to many Republicans who do not want to be seen by constituents as carrying out the will of Mr. Obama.
So while lawmakers from both parties are privately relying on the White House and its agencies to provide technical information to draft scores of amendments to the immigration bill, few Republicans are willing to admit it. Some are so eager to prove that the White House is not pulling the strings that their aides say the administration is not playing any role at all.
“President Obama’s concept of engaging Congress is giving a speech that nobody up here listens to,” said Alex Conant, a spokesman for Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, who is an important supporter of the immigration legislation. “If passing legislation is like making sausage, then this White House is like a bunch of vegetarians.”
As senators near a final tally on the 867-page bill before the July 4 holiday, immigration supporters acknowledge serious risks in Mr. Obama’s approach: leaving the public advocacy for a major piece of his legacy in the hands of others. If the bill fails to become law, Mr. Obama will be open to criticism from Hispanics that he did not put the weight of his office behind the legislation.
But Mr. Obama has made some careful public efforts, including a speech last week at the White House in which he strongly endorsed the legislation. On Tuesday while on Air Force One in Europe, he called a Democratic negotiator, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, to reinforce his opposition to part of a Republican amendment that would have what the administration views as unrealistically tough requirements for border security.
Inside Room 201, the administration has gathered a collection of its own Congressional lobbyists, policy specialists and experts from an alphabet soup of the agencies that will have to put the immigration legislation into effect if it passes. They all moved into the vice president’s offices on June 10, setting up laptop computers and thick binders filled with proposed amendments on an oval conference table.
“We have folks who know the Senate really well, who know the players, who have been through this before so they know exactly what Senate staff needs,” Ms. Muñoz said. “We are deeply, deeply engaged.”
The group is led by Ed Pagano, Mr. Obama’s chief liaison to the Senate and a former chief of staff to Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee. He is joined by Felicia Escobar and Tyler Moran, senior advisers at the Domestic Policy Council, and Esther Olavarria, director for immigration reform for the National Security Council staff. Some days, Ms. Muñoz and Miguel Rodriguez, the president’s chief Congressional liaison, are there too.
On one day this week, those at the table included two representatives from the Justice Department, a homeland security official, a State Department official and someone from the Department of Labor. Throughout the day they pored through proposed amendments, offering suggestions to the staff of the senators who offered them and flagging problems that might arise.
At one point, Mr. Pagano, Ms. Escobar and the other White House advisers huddled for 45 minutes in the smaller of the two rooms with Mr. Leahy’s top aides. Working from spreadsheets, they discussed each of the 10 amendments that Mr. Leahy was likely to bring to the floor for a vote that day.
“When Republican amendments are filed and we are trying to decide, ‘Can we accept this? Can we accept this without some modifications?’ they are the ones who tell us, ‘This is quite doable,’ ” said one Democratic Senate leadership aide, who requested anonymity to talk about legislative strategy.
A version of this article appeared in print on June 21, 2013, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: White House Offers Stealth Campaign to Support Immigration Bill.

Deception




Proverbs 10:9  

 

Whoever walks in integrity walks securely, but he who makes his ways crooked will be found out.


Romans 13:11 

Besides this you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.


Revelation 21:8 

But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.”



Deuteronomy 16:19-20 

You shall not pervert justice. You shall not show partiality, and you shall not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and subverts the cause of the righteous. Justice, and only justice, you shall follow, that you may live and inherit the land that the Lord your God is giving you.



Tuesday, June 25, 2013

http://www.businessinsider.com/john-kellys-speech-about-marines-in-ramadi-2013-6

http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/mark-levin-government-is-simulating-the-collapse-of-our-financial-system-the-collapse-of-our-society-and-the-potential-for-widespread-violence_03082013


http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/mcgrath-the-control-grid-is-being-put-into-place-to-handle-what-they-know-is-coming_04062012


http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/imminent-i-dont-think-obama-is-going-to-finish-his-second-term-without-the-bottom-dropping-out_06032013


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http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/mcgrath-the-control-grid-is-being-put-into-place-to-handle-what-they-know-is-coming_04062012



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Those wild and crazy Mayans put down their marker that the end of the world would occur on Dec. 21, 2012 — about two months from now. There is, of course, some small chance that they might be right. On the other hand, there is a very large probability that the real end of the world will occur around March 4, 2014. The doomsday clock will ring then because the U.S. economy may fully crash around that date, which will, in turn, bring down all world economies and all hope of any recovery for the foreseeable future — certainly over the course of most of our lifetimes. Interest rates will skyrocket, businesses will fail, unemployment will go to record levels, material and food shortages will be rampant, and there could be major social unrest. Any wishful thinking that America is in a “recovery” and that “things are getting better” is an illusion. The problem is not Medicare, which won’t quit on us for another six or seven years. Nor is it Social Security, which will not be fully bankrupt for another 15 years or so. The crisis is much more immediate and much more serious. The central problem is that America is the bank of the world. What this means, simply, is that the dollar is the world’s currency (often termed the “reserve currency”). Throughout the world, nearly all traded goods, oil, major commodities, real estate, etc., are denominated in dollars. The world needs dollars, and the U.S. provides them and provides confidence that the dollar is the “safest” currency in the world. Countries get dollars by trading with us on attractive terms, which enables Americans to live very well. Countries support this system and cover their risk by investing in dollars through T-bill auctions and other mechanisms, which enables us to run budget deficits — up to a point. The central issue is confidence in America, and the world is losing confidence quickly. At a certain point, soon, the United States will reach a level of deficit spending and debt at which the countries of the world will lose faith in America and begin to withdraw their investments. Many leading economists and bankers think another trillion dollars or so may do it. A run on the bank will start suddenly, build quickly and snowball. At that point, we will need to finance our own deficit, and we will not be able to do so. We will raise bond rates to re-attract foreign investment, interest rates will go up, and businesses will fail. Unemployment will skyrocket. The rest of the world will fully crash along with us. Europe will continue to decline, and the euro will not replace the dollar. Russia will see a collapse in oil prices as market demand softens, and Russia will collapse along with it. China will find nowhere to export and also will collapse. The Russian and Chinese governments, which see all this coming and have been stockpiling gold to hedge against such a dollar collapse, will find that you cannot eat gold. There will be uprisings — think of the streets in Spain and Greece today — everywhere. Technological advances that traditionally drive productivity increases and economic growth will not be able to keep up with this collapse. When might this all happen? Paul Volker indicates we might face a mess like this in the next year and a half. David Walker, former U.S. comptroller, i.e., the former chief accountant of the U.S. government, has suggested similar time frames for economic catastrophe. Most agree that the budget sequestration approach won’t work from either economic or political perspectives, and mindless across-the-board cuts in spending will only exacerbate a mess. The Federal Reserve’s third round of quantitative easing, in which we print money to buy our own bonds in order to goose economic and employment numbers, means we are floating our own debt, a good formula for sudden hyperinflation. The next president will have about six months to fix this problem before it is too late. He must be fully prepared, able and willing to work with Congress and move quickly and decisively. During the election, the most important question to ask is, who understands all this and is prepared to prevent it? Everything else is noise. Grady Means is a businessman, former assistant to Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and former economist at the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. by Taboola From the Web Billionaire Tells Americans to Prepare For "Financial Ruin"Moneynews Economist: "Obama Won't Finish Term Without Bottom Dropping Out"Money Morning Controversial Video Spreads Virally After Being BannedMoneynews Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/oct/25/us-economy-on-schedule-to-crash-march-2014/#ixzz2XIU7l3Ut Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/oct/25/us-economy-on-schedule-to-crash-march-2014/



Intentionally Crashing The U.S. Economy - Obama's agenda continued...


 http://conservativewatchnews.org/?page_id=2398

Admin: November 7, 2009 
THIS IS A MUST READ, AMERICA!
Updated: July 22, 2011
You’ve heard former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel say, “…never let a crisis go to waste.” You’ve heard from Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and other say how much of the “Sal Alinsky” model “Rules for Radicals” lawmakers and government officials are following.  You’ve heard how Van Jones was an admitted Communist, before he was appointed (and later resigned) as “Green Czar” under Barack Obama.  Cass Sunstein even wants to “tweek” or “nudge” our Constitution bit by bit.  After you read this article, you may begin to connect the dots in your understanding. Health care ‘REFORM’ is just part of a literal ‘POWER GRAB‘ TO CREATE A SOCIALIST STATE!
All of this leads us to think about a last minute statement made on one of Glenn Beck’s shows:  “…look up “Cloward & Piven.”
Well, folks, we took him up on it and here is what we found on http://Cloward-Piven.com,
Quote:“Cloward-Piven is a strategy for forcing political change through orchestrated crisis.”
The strategy was first proposed in 1966 by Columbia University political scientists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven as a plan to bankrupt the welfare system and produce radical change. Sometimes known as the “crisis strategy” or the the “flood-the-rolls, bankrupt-the-cities strategy,” the Cloward-Piven approach called for swamping the welfare rolls with new applicants – more than the system could bear. It was hoped that the resulting economic collapse would lead to political turmoil and ultimately socialism.
The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), founded by African-American militant George Alvin Wiley, put the Cloward-Piven strategy to work in the streets. Its activities led directly to the welfare crisis that bankrupted New York City in 1975.
Veterans of NWRO went on to found the Living Wage Movement and the Voting Rights Movement, both of which rely on the Cloward-Piven strategy and both of which are spear-headed by the radical cult ACORN.
Both the Living Wage and Voting Rights movements depend heavily on financial support from George Soros’s Open Society Institute.
On August 11, 1965, the black district of Watts in Los Angeles exploded into violence, after police used batons to subdue a man suspected of drunk driving. Riots raged for six days, spilling over into other parts of the city, and leaving 34 dead. Two Columbia University sociologists, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were inspired by the riots to develop a new strategy for social change. In November 1965 – barely three months after the fires of Watts had subsided – Cloward and Piven began privately circulating copies of an article they had written called “Mobilizing the Poor: How it Could Be Done.” Six months later (on May 2, 1966), it was published in The Nation, under the title, “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty.”
The article electrified the Left. Following its May 2, 1966 publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called “crisis strategy” or “Cloward-Piven strategy,” as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.
Richard A. Cloward was then a professor of social work at Columbia University. He died in 2001. His co-author Frances Fox Piven was a research associate at Columbia’s School of Social Work. She now holds a Distinguished Professorship of Political Science and Sociology at the City University of New York.
In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor. By providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Cloward and Piven wanted to fan those flames. Poor people can advance only when “the rest of society is afraid of them,” Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system. The collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation. Poor people would rise in revolt. Only then would “the rest of society” accept their demands. So wrote Cloward and Piven in 1966.
The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. This Cloward and Piven proposed to do, in classic Alinsky fashion, by forcing welfare bureaucrats to live up to their own book of rules.
The authors noted that the number of Americans subsisting on welfare – about 8 million, at the time – probably represented less than half the number who were technically eligible for full benefits. They proposed a “massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls.” Cloward and Piven calculated that persuading even a fraction of potential welfare recipients to demand their entitlements would bankrupt the system. The result, they predicted, would be “a profound financial and political crisis” that would unleash “powerful forces… for major economic reform at the national level.”
Their article called for “cadres of aggressive organizers” to use “demonstrations to create a climate of militancy.” Intimidated by black violence, politicians would appeal to the federal government for help. Carefully orchestrated media campaigns, carried out by friendly, leftwing journalists, would float the idea of a “a federal program of income redistribution,” in the form of a guaranteed living income for all; working and non-working people alike. Local officials would clutch at this idea like drowning men to a lifeline. They would apply pressure on Washington to implement it. With every major city erupting into chaos, Washington would have to act.
The Cloward-Piven strategy never achieved its goal of system breakdown and a Marxist utopia. But it provided a blueprint for some of the Left’s most destructive campaigns of the next three decades. It will likely haunt America for years to come since George Soros’ Shadow Party has now adopted the strategy, honing it into a far more efficient weapon than any of its Sixties-era promoters could have foreseen.
Cloward and Piven recruited a militant black organizer named George Wiley to lead their new movement. For more information on Wiley and his welfare rights movement. In the summer of 1967, Wiley founded the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), with headquarters in Washington, DC. Wiley’s tactics closely followed the recommendations set out in Cloward and Piven’s article. His followers invaded welfare offices across the nation – often violently – bullying social workers and loudly demanding every penny to which the law “entitled” them. By 1969, NWRO claimed a dues-paying membership of 22,500 families, with 523 chapters across the nation.
Regarding Wiley’s tactics, The New York Times commented on September 27, 1970, “There have been sit-ins in legislative chambers, including a United States Senate committee hearing, mass demonstrations of several thousand welfare recipients, school boycotts, picket lines, mounted police, tear gas, arrests – and, on occasion, rock-throwing, smashed glass doors, overturned desks, scattered papers and ripped-out phones.”
These methods proved effective. “The flooding succeeded beyond Wiley’s wildest dreams,” writes Sol Stern in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. “From 1965 to 1974, the number of single-parent households on welfare soared from 4.3 million to 10.8 million, despite mostly flush economic times. By the early 1970s, one person was on the welfare rolls in New York City for every two working in the city’s private economy.”
As a direct result of its reckless welfare spending, New York City – the financial capital of the world – was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1975. The entire state of New York nearly went down with it. Leftist agitators swooned in triumph. The Cloward-Piven strategy had proved its effectiveness.
The Backlash

The Cloward-Piven strategy depended on surprise. Once society recovered from the initial shock, the backlash began. New York’s welfare crisis horrified the nation, giving rise to a reform movement which culminated in “the end of welfare as we know it” — the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which imposed time limits on federal welfare, along with strict eligibility and work requirements. Both Cloward and Piven attended the White House signing of the bill as guests of President Clinton.

Most Americans to this day have never heard of Cloward and Piven. But Mayor Rudolph Giuliani attempted to expose them in the late 1990′s. As his drive for welfare reform heated up, Giuliani accused the militant scholars by name, citing their 1966 manifesto as evidence that they had engaged in deliberate economic sabotage. “This wasn’t an accident,” Giuliani charged in a 1997 speech. “It wasn’t an atmospheric thing, it wasn’t supernatural. This is the result of policies and programs designed to have the maximum number of people get on welfare.”

Cloward and Piven never again revealed their intentions as candidly as they had in their 1966 article. They learned to cover their tracks. Even so, their activism in subsequent years continued to rely on the tactic of overloading the system. When the public caught on to their welfare scheme, Cloward and Piven simply moved on, applying pressure to other sectors of the bureaucracy, wherever they detected weakness.

The Cloward-Piven strategy – first proposed in 1966 – seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse. Application of this strategy contributed greatly to the turmoil of the late Sixties. Cloward-Piven failed to usher in socialism, but it succeeded in generating an economic crisis and in escalating the level of political violence in America – two cherished goals of hard-Left strategists.

Radical organizers today continue tinkering with variations on the Cloward-Piven theme, in the perennial hope of reproducing ’60s-style chaos. The thuggish behavior of leftwing unions such as SEIU and of certain elements of George Soros’ Shadow Party can be traced, in a direct line of descent, from the early practitioners of Cloward-Piven.

Cloward-Piven’s early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. “Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1989 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every jot and tittle of every law and statute; every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet; and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s failure to “live up” to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist one.

In its earliest form, the Cloward-Piven strategy applied Alinsky’s principle to the specific area of welfare entitlements. It counseled activists to create what might be called Trojan Horse movements – mass movements whose outward purpose seemed to be providing material help to the downtrodden, but whose real purpose was to draft poor people into service as revolutionary foot soldiers.
The specific function of these Trojan Horse movements was to mobilize poor people en masse to overwhelm government agencies with a flood of demands beyond the capacity of those agencies to meet. The flood of demands was calculated to break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears into gridlock, and bring the system crashing down. Fear, turmoil, violence and economic collapse would accompany such a breakdown – providing perfect conditions for fostering radical change. That, at least, was the theory behind the Cloward-Piven strategy.

In 1982, partisans of the Cloward-Piven strategy founded a new “voting rights movement,” which purported to take up the unfinished work of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Like ACORN, the organization that spear-headed this campaign, the new “voting rights” movement was led by veterans of George Wiley’s welfare rights crusade. Its flagship organizations were Project Vote and Human SERVE, both founded in 1982. Project Vote is an ACORN front group, launched by former NWRO organizer and ACORN co-founder Zach Polett. Human SERVE was founded by Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, along with a former NWRO organizer named Hulbert James.

All three of these organizations – ACORN, Project Vote and Human SERVE – set to work lobbying energetically for the so-called Motor-Voter law, which Bill Clinton ultimately signed in 1993. The Motor-Voter bill is widely blamed today for swamping the voter rolls with “dead wood” – invalid registrations signed in the name of deceased, ineligible or non-existent people – thus opening the door to the unprecedented levels of voter fraud and “voter disenfranchisement” claims that followed in subsequent elections.

The new “voting rights” coalition combines mass voter registration drives – typically featuring high levels of fraud – with systematic intimidation of election officials in the form of frivolous lawsuits, bogus charges of “racism” and “disenfranchisement” and “direct action” (street protests, violent or otherwise). Just as they swamped America’s welfare offices in the 1960s, the Cloward-Piven team now seeks to overwhelm the nation’s understaffed and poorly policed electoral system.

Their antics set the stage for the Florida recount crisis of 2000, and have introduced a level of fear, tension and foreboding to U.S. elections heretofore encountered mainly in Third World countries. For more information on the Voting Rights Movement, see the entry for “Project Vote.”

Both the Living Wage and Voting Rights movements depend heavily on financial support from George Soros’s Open Society Institute. It is largely thanks to money from Soros that the Cloward-Piven strategy continues even now to eat away at America’s political and economic infrastructure.
______________________________________
If you have made it this far, you may begin to understand how and why the Obama Administration is functioning as it is and how the radical advisory surrounding the administration is affecting major agenda issues and decisions.  Listen carefully to some of the ways Obama makes his statements.  Sometimes, they appear legit. But, once in a while, you’ll see through the lies and deception. There is a “hidden agenda.” You may even think, they are, in a stealth manner, bringing in socialism and ultimately communism, not to mention the possibility of having a dictatorship. 
We pray to the Lord God our Creator that this does not happen to our great nation, the United States of America.

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Stating the Obvious: Obama is INTENTIONALLY CRASHING THE U.S. ECONOMY

 http://townhall.com/columnists/rachelalexander/2012/10/29/obamas_reelection_will_ensure_complete_us_economic_collapse/page/full

 

Obama's Reelection Will Ensure Complete U.S. Economic Collapse

Rachel Alexander | Oct 29, 2012
Rachel Alexander
Recommend this article
This coming presidential election will determine whether the U.S. ends up in another Great Depression or pulls out of the economic slump. There are numerous signs indicating that the country is headed for economic Armageddon under Obama. Some analysts are predicting the crash could come as soon as next year. Obama is following the failed policies of President Herbert Hoover which led to the Great Depression.
Conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh says the U.S. is on an unsustainable course; there isn't enough money from taxes to pay everyone lifetime healthcare, lifetime pensions, and hefty incomes. The federal government now spends 50 percent more than it takes in. Social Security and Medicare are on the brink of insolvency and are little more than government Ponzi schemes. Soon there will be more people on welfare than not. Borrowing and printing more money will no longer save the country from defaulting, because our debt will soon be so high other countries will not want our dollars.
Earlier this year, three financial analysts predicted financial meltdown will take place in less than a year. Author Robert Prechter, who wrote the book Conquer the Crash, sees economic parallels to the Great Depression and predicts the illusion of a recovery will fail like it did in the 1930s. Art Laffer, the economist who invented the Laffer Curve, predicted a crash in 2011 if the Bush tax cuts were not extended. Since Obama backed down and extended the tax cuts through 2013, the crash has been delayed.
Economist John Williams predicts that a hyperinflationary Great Depression will take place by 2014. Investment banker Martin Hutchinson believes that the next stock market crash will be worse than Black Monday, the 1987 crash which dropped lower than the 1929 crash. The 1987 crash did not trigger a depression because there wasn't an accompanying collapse of the banking system. Hutchinson warns, “We are living in the greatest debt bubble in the history of the world and Wall Street has been transformed into a giant casino that is based on a massive web of debt, risk and leverage.“
The U.S. is arguably in a depression, but the government won't admit it because it makes the government look bad. Thanks to welfare programs, it doesn't seem as bad as the Great Depression. 25 percent of adults may be out of work, but they have welfare instead of Hoovervilles. Instead of starving Americans standing in food lines, we see Americans obese from living on food stamps. An economic depression occurs when there is greater than 10 percent contraction in economic activity over a period of 12 months or more. By contrast, recessions usually last 10 months. The longest recession in history until now lasted 16 months. This recession began in December 2007 and supposedly ended in June 2009, but the recovery is the weakest in history after a recession. If this is only a recession, it is an extremely severe one.
The condition of the U.S. economy today mirrors the economic situation prior to the Great Depression. There is slow economic growth, massive deficits, high unemployment and foreclosures, and a shaky banking system. Real unemployment is at the same level it was during the Great Depression, around 25 percent. The drop in home prices and sales is actually worse than during the Great Depression. The stock market has been dropping, and stocks are currently overvalued by as much as 50 percent. Speculative greed precipitated the stock market crash, similar to the investors and homeowners of today who made risky investments they could not afford.
Like Obama, President Herbert Hoover used a heavy-handed government interventionist approach to deal with the bad economy. Hoover was criticized by his successor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, for “reckless and extravagant spending” and “thinking we ought to control everything in Washington.” Hoover raised taxes and slapped a tariff on imports. The top rate on personal income taxes rose from 25 percent to 63 percent. Taxes were increased on businesses and tobacco, and new taxes were added to telegraph and telephone use and checks.
Obama has put onerous regulations into place that are crippling the economy and allowing little room for recovery. There are environmental restrictions on offshore drilling, CO2 emissions, and Obama refuses to approve the Keystone Pipeline, which would have created 100,000 jobs and reduced dependency on foreign oil. Americans are already taxed to the hilt, and their taxes will go up even higher with Obamacare, the biggest tax increase in history. Buried under taxes and regulations, businesses are unable to create new jobs. Businesses are fleeing the country or outsourcing labor, due to the burdensome regulations and demands unions have placed on them. Because of the unions inflating the cost of production, it has been easy for China to shut out our overpriced products. China manipulates its currency, undervaluing the yuan in order to boost exports and limit imports. China's trade surplus helped bring about the recession. When the crash comes, China may demand that the U.S. pay its debt, even if the U.S. does not have the money to pay it.
The Great Depression was triggered by the Federal Reserve's manipulation of money, the stock market crash and failure of financial institutions. The Federal Reserve manipulates interest rates by pumping new dollar bills into the economy through the banks. This lowers the interest rates, which prompts more risky investments. The Federal Reserve caused the last recession in this way, yet it continues to pump paper money into the economy, a manipulation known as “quantitative easing.” All of this Federal Reserve activity only postpones the inevitable crash, ensuring that it will be a big crash.
How will the financial meltdown happen? Limbaugh predicts California will file bankruptcy under Obama, then other states will follow suit. There will be a stock market crash and Americans will lose their savings. Banks will fail as people rush to take their money out, and those who don't get their money out early on will find their accounts frozen. There isn't enough money to bail out all the banks if they all fail. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was created in 1934 to avoid a repeat of banks failing during the Great Depression, but there is no longer enough real money left for massive bailouts. America's level of debt and deficit spending will cause other countries to lose confidence in the dollar, and they will start withdrawing their investments.
There will be rioting and major civil unrest. The violent Occupy Wall Street protesters are an indication that it is already starting. Economist John Williams predicts, “Trouble could range from turmoil in the food distribution chain and electronic cash and credit systems unable to handle rapidly changing circumstances, to political instability.” The government will finally be forced to choose what will no longer be funded.
Because of the global economy, the effects will be felt worldwide. Most European countries are already in a depression. Europe is headed for collapse. Countries like Spain, Greece and Italy have overvalued euros, making their economies uncompetitive. People are fleeing Spain, where unemployment is at 25 percent. They are pulling their money out of the banks and moving to England and other countries to find jobs. Seven percent of Spain's GDP was withdrawn from Spanish banks during July. Not only Spain is affected, banks are starting to collapse around the world, freezing customers' bank accounts. These things will happen in the U.S. too if our economy collapses.
What has brought the U.S. to the brink of economic collapse? Greed. As a result of the Federal Reserve flooding the market with paper money, interest rates artificially decreased, so people made investments and bought homes they couldn't afford, putting themselves way into debt. The banks continue to make reckless investments, despite the heavy regulations Obama has forced on the industry. When the Ponzi scheme fell apart, the government bailed out a few select banks and arbitrarily pumped billions of dollars into the economy, but it has only put a temporary band-aid on the problem.
If Obama wins reelection, Americans should pull their money out of the banks and stock market and put it into gold and other precious metals, where it will be much safer during a crash. Obama has indicated he will continue the failed policies of Herbert Hoover and FDR. Obama said he wants a “New New Deal,” referring to FDR's socialist programs. Under Hoover and FDR, those big government programs slowed the recovery and prolonged double-digit unemployment after the Great Depression.
Fortunately, it looks like Mitt Romney is going to win the presidential election. If anyone can reverse the runaway government spending, it will be Mitt Romney with his successful business and investment background in the private sector. President Ronald Reagan faced a worse economy than Obama did when he entered office, but by cutting taxes and streamlining regulations, annual economic growth rates increased up to 8 percent, quadruple Obama’s record now. America needs a transformation from a high-consuming, debt-ridden economy, to a manufacturing and exporting nation once again. Obama tells Americans the government will provide all kinds of things for them, even though it has been made painfully clear the government cannot afford to. Romney will tell Americans the truth, that greed is what got us into this situation. If Americans focus instead on taking pride in a day's work, the entire economy will turn around. 
 
 

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The Blurred Line Between Espionage and Truth NYT - David Carr

The Media Equation
 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/27/business/media/white-house-uses-espionage-act-to-pursue-leak-cases-media-equation.html?_r=0
 

Blurred Line Between Espionage and Truth

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Published: February 26, 2012 126 Comments
Last Wednesday in the White House briefing room, the administration’s press secretary, Jay Carney, opened on a somber note, citing the deaths of Marie Colvin and Anthony Shadid, two reporters who had died “in order to bring truth” while reporting in Syria.
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Jake Tapper of ABC News questioned the Obama administration's efforts to prosecute officials.
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Thomas A. Drake, a former employee of the National Security Agency, was prosecuted under the Espionage Act last year.

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Jake Tapper, the White House correspondent for ABC News, pointed out that the administration had lauded brave reporting in distant lands more than once and then asked, “How does that square with the fact that this administration has been so aggressively trying to stop aggressive journalism in the United States by using the Espionage Act to take whistle-blowers to court?”
He then suggested that the administration seemed to believe that “the truth should come out abroad; it shouldn’t come out here.”
Fair point. The Obama administration, which promised during its transition to power that it would enhance “whistle-blower laws to protect federal workers,” has been more prone than any administration in history in trying to silence and prosecute federal workers.
The Espionage Act, enacted back in 1917 to punish those who gave aid to our enemies, was used three times in all the prior administrations to bring cases against government officials accused of providing classified information to the media. It has been used six times since the current president took office.
Setting aside the case of Pfc. Bradley Manning, an Army intelligence analyst who is accused of stealing thousands of secret documents, the majority of the recent prosecutions seem to have everything to do with administrative secrecy and very little to do with national security.
In case after case, the Espionage Act has been deployed as a kind of ad hoc Official Secrets Act, which is not a law that has ever found traction in America, a place where the people’s right to know is viewed as superseding the government’s right to hide its business.
In the most recent case, John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer who became a Democratic staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was charged under the Espionage Act with leaking information to journalists about other C.I.A. officers, some of whom were involved in the agency’s interrogation program, which included waterboarding.
For those of you keeping score, none of the individuals who engaged in or authorized the waterboarding of terror suspects have been prosecuted, but Mr. Kiriakou is in federal cross hairs, accused of talking to journalists and news organizations, including The New York Times.
Mr. Tapper said that he had not planned on raising the issue, but hearing Mr. Carney echo the praise for reporters who dug deep to bring out the truth elsewhere got his attention.
“I have been following all of these case, and it’s not like they are instances of government employees leaking the location of secret nuclear sites,” Mr. Tapper said. “These are classic whistle-blower cases that dealt with questionable behavior by government officials or its agents acting in the name of protecting America.”
Mr. Carney said in the briefing that he felt it was appropriate “to honor and praise the bravery” of Ms. Colvin and Mr. Shadid, but he did not really engage Mr. Tapper’s broader question, saying he could not go into information about specific cases. He did not respond to an e-mail message seeking comment.
In one of the more remarkable examples of the administration’s aggressive approach, Thomas A. Drake, a former employee of the National Security Agency, was prosecuted under the Espionage Act last year and faced a possible 35 years in prison.
His crime? When his agency was about to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a software program bought from the private sector intended to monitor digital data, he spoke with a reporter at The Baltimore Sun. He suggested an internally developed program that cost significantly less would be more effective and not violate privacy in the way the product from the vendor would. (He turned out to be right, by the way.)
He was charged with 10 felony counts that accused him of lying to investigators and obstructing justice. Last summer, the case against him collapsed, and he pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor, of misuse of a government computer.
Jesselyn Radack, the director for national security and human rights at the Government Accountability Project, was one of the lawyers who represented him.
“The Obama administration has been quite hypocritical about its promises of openness, transparency and accountability,” she said. “All presidents hate leaks, but pursuing whistle-blowers as spies is heavy-handed and beyond the scope of the law.”
Mark Corallo, who served under Attorney General John D. Ashcroft during the Bush administration, told Adam Liptak of The New York Times this month that he was “sort of shocked” by the number of leak prosecutions under President Obama. “We would have gotten hammered for it,” he said.
As Mr. Liptak pointed out, it has become easier to ferret out leakers in a digital age, but just because it can be done doesn’t mean it should be.
These kinds of prosecutions can have ripples well beyond the immediate proceedings. Two reporters in Washington who work on national security issues said that the rulings had created a chilly environment between journalists and people who work at the various government agencies.
During a point in history when our government has been accused of sending prisoners to secret locations where they were said to have been tortured and the C.I.A. is conducting remote-controlled wars in far-flung places, it’s not a good time to treat the people who aid in the publication of critical information as spies.
And it’s worth pointing out that the administration’s emphasis on secrecy comes and goes depending on the news. Reporters were immediately and endlessly briefed on the “secret” operation that successfully found and killed Osama bin Laden. And the drone program in Pakistan and Afghanistan comes to light in a very organized and systematic way every time there is a successful mission.
There is plenty of authorized leaking going on, but this particular boat leaks from the top. Leaks from the decks below, especially ones that might embarrass the administration, have been dealt with very differently.
E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;
Twitter.com/carr2n

Monday, June 24, 2013

Bono: George Bush, evangelicals saved 9 million AIDS victims | WashingtonExaminer.com

Bono: George Bush, evangelicals saved 9 million AIDS victims | WashingtonExaminer.com

http://washingtonexaminer.com/article/2532298


WASHINGTON SECRETS

Bono: George Bush, evangelicals saved 9 million AIDS victims

BY: PAUL BEDARD JUNE 24, 2013 | 9:46 AM | MODIFIED: JUNE 24, 2013 AT 9:50 AM
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TOPICS: GEORGE W. BUSH WASHINGTON SECRETS
U2 frontman Bono, who moonlights as an activist for the poor and sick in Africa, is crediting evangelical Christians and former President George W. Bush for saving 9 million from the ravages of AIDS, a campaign the musician said is blessed by God.
"This should be shouted from the rooftops. This is a heroic American story," Bono said in a remarkable radio interview with Jim Daly, the president of Focus on the Family, to be broadcast by the group Tuesday.
Talking freely about God, his marriage, and his relationship with Jesus in the interview provided in advance to Secrets, Bono said that evangelical Christians helped him sell the Bush administration on fighting AIDS in Africa, which he compared to the biblical humanity in tackling leprosy.
"It was the evangelicals that did that," said Bono. "Because they, like myself, pestered George Bush and the administration, who actually deserve praise for starting this out," he added of the $15 billion President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief program.
The interview marked a shift for Focus on the Family as it expands its ministry to offer a voice to those not typically considered Christian-focused and broaden its reach to new generation.
"The way Bono lives out his faith is a message we are trying to emphasize with families every day," said Daly.
In the interview, recorded at New York's American Bible Society, Bono didn't hide his ties to God or the lessons he learned from his example. "I believe that Jesus was, you know, the son of God," he said, adding, "Jesus isn't letting you off the hook."
Bono, whose ONE Campaign is encouraging rich nations to forgive debt to poor nations, described the New Testament as the blueprint for justice and personal redemption. "Jesus begins his ministry by, what, by quoting Isaiah. He walks into the temple and he said, 'That the blind may see, set the captives free, that the poor'--all the sort of justice agenda. That's how Christ began," said Bono.
He also compared Jesus to radical punk rock music. "Jesus didn't have many manners as we now know," he said. Recalling a story where Jesus told a man not to wait and bury his father but to follow him immediately, Bono rejected Daly's "cold-hearted" characterization. "Seems punk rock to me. He could see right into that fellow's heart. He knew he wasn't coming and he was just, it was pretense. We've gotta be a bit more cutting edge, not look to the signs of righteousness. Look to the actions."
Bono is currently working on a new album with U2 and gave Daly a high compliment after theFocus on the Family chief quoted C.S. Lewis: "When a man is getting better, he understands more and more clearly the evil that's left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less."
Said Bono, "That could turn up on the next U2 album." Then he smirked, "But I won't give him or you any credit."
Paul Bedard, The Washington Examiner's "Washington Secrets" columnist, can be contacted atpbedard@washingtonexaminer.com.
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