One 77-year-old’s search for the truth: 9/11, election fraud, illegal wars, Wall Street criminality, a stolen nuke, the neocon wars, control of the U.S. government by global corporations, the unjustified assault on Social Security, media complicity, and the "Great Recession" about to become the second Great Depression. "The most important truths are hidden from us by the powerful few who strive to steal the American dream by keeping We the People in the dark."
Doctors speak out about H1N1 VACCINE DANGERS A new video (October 22, 2009) in question-and-answer format, multiple speakers
Swine Flu Vaccine: Will We Have a Choice? An older video (June 23, 2009), single very good speaker: President National Vaccine Information Center
Post Script: A CBS News report finds that the number of H1N1 flu cases may be vastly overestimated AND that this fact seems to have been actively covered up by U.S. Government health services.
Political “leadership” of the two oligarchy parties spin their economic policy as being for the public benefit. Professional economists increasingly cast economic policy in unprecedented harsh criticism, even calling for public demonstrations against what they claim as gross violations of financial law. Let’s consider current facts of high importance:
• A so-called bailout designed to give money to the banksters without accountability of where the money is going. This is according to testimony of Elizabeth Warren, Harvard law professor appointed to oversee the bailout for Congress, with video explanation below. The bankster-bailout was chosen rather than simply protecting depositors and reorganizing the banks under standard bankruptcy procedure. The two oligarchy political parties denied Congressional hearings for the bankster-bailout, which should have considered cost-benefit analysis for public banks rather than private banks. An important fact that would have come out of the hearings is that the total market capitalization of all the major US banks was less than $300 billion; meaning that the government could have outright bought all of them for less than a tenth of the amount given away. Think about that.
• 100,000 laid-off teachers with class sizes expanding to over 40 students per class, and over a million homeless US students.
• The economic crushing of the American middle class, as explained by Elizabeth Warren in her video.
• Record high home foreclosures. An alternative policy to the bankster-bailout would have been to have the banks write-down the value of the mortgages they fraudulently wrote, and reset that lower value as the new loan amount for the homeowner. This could have been a preliminary move to creating non-profit mortgage rates for the public benefit.
Dylan Ratigan of MSNBC’s show, “Morning Meeting,” calls the economic “bailout” and subsequent policy, “the largest theft and cover-up ever,” “the worst deal since the Indians sold Manhattan,” “the ‘Masters of the Universe’ are on the take from the taxpayers,” “the biggest transfer of money in the history of the world,” and “No one, the Pharaohs, you pick ‘em, no one even comes close to how much the banks and politicians have stolen from us.” His video is also below.
Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term, Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal, and Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University simply writes, “The rich have stolen the economy.”
If it’s any comfort, remember that America was born from recognition that our government was playing us, exploiting our labor for their financial gain and not for the public good. Remember that our government labeled Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, James Madison, and all the Founding Fathers as “traitors” when they didn’t blindly and stupidly believe the empty spin that the government was acting in the public good. They also predicted that future generations would have to fight to retain the liberty they wrested from lying political whores who murdered the public good in exchange for personal wealth, fame and power.
If you ever wondered how educated Germans could ever believe Nazi propaganda, all you have to do is look around the US today.
The good news is that the structural economic change for the public good is simple. Monetary reform ends the banks from creating money, shifts this power to the Treasury for the direct payment of public goods and services and minimizing the peoples’ cost of credit (think 1% interest-rate mortgages). Real regulation will end casino capitalism with exotic derivatives betting on future economic outcomes that produce no public benefit in the gambling. Taking money out of elections and politics will limit political corruption. Breaking up the five corporations that currently serve as the propaganda arm of the oligarchy will help; the so-called mainstream media, or sheepstream media corpse as I like to call it.
To get from here to the good news is a formidable task. I suggest a Truth and Reconciliation process to exchange our getting the complete truth and ending all criminal and damaging political and economic acts for the perpetrators’ cooperation and return of public assets. I’d even allow them a stipend to facilitate their surrender of our government and economy; what the oligarchy presently consider their own twisted private playground.
The two interviews are necessary education for the public to see the economy for what it is. They are 6-minutes and 7-minutes.
As always, please share this article with all who say they want economic competence and want to be responsible citizens. If you appreciate my work, please subscribe by clicking under the article title. Please feel free to peruse my archive of work here.
Professor Chossudovsky tells you how the scam works.
From here on, no more "socialist" government taking our hard-earned tax money to aid the poor. No! The new privatized U.S.A. will socialize the gambling losses of the big banks, taking money from the poor -- soon to include the former middle class -- to "aid" the super rich.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average has topped 10,000 for the first time in a year, as JPMorgan Chase reported massive profits in the third quarter. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that major US banks and securities firms are on pace to pay their employees about $140 billion this year—a record high. But on Main Street, foreclosures are also at record levels, and the official unemployment rate is expected to top ten percent. We speak to former bank regulator William Black, author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One.
The health care debate and general political climate compound absurdity upon absurdity.
First we're told that our health care is only worth the time and effort if the remedy has no negative impact on the budget. No deficits allowed. The deficit risk defines your chances for health and longevity.
At the same time, we see that Wall Street failures and the overseas war effort are not held to the same standard on deficits spending.
The federal government has committed $23 trillion dollars to prop up Wall Street's failed financial institutions. That's a fantasy figure and clearly deficit-friendly since it's twice the 2008 Gross Domestic Product of the United States.
On Tuesday of this week a smaller amount was offered up for the 2010 expenditures on the Iraq war and the expanded efforts in Afghanistan. The $128 billion was approved without a Congressional Budget Office analysis (note the absence of a link for "CBO Cost Estimates"). Since we're already over budget for 2010, this is also in the deficit column.
It's all right to run huge deficits to bailout Wall Street crooks and to wage deadly wars but it's not all right to even think about a deficit when it comes to preserving the health and lives of citizens.
The second absurdity concerns priorities. A rational approach to national policy would place citizen health care well above both Wall Street welfare and endless wars on any list of priorities. But that wouldn't do much good with the current legislative approach.
A political victory amounts to a loss for the public. Why?
The current legislation delays help for the uninsured for years. It limits the "public option" to those without health insurance. It does little or nothing to contain rising health care costs for in the near term. And it ignores prescription medication -- a major factor in out-of-control costs.
If you are insured now, you will get the pre-existing conditions exclusion lifted from future policies and some other benefits like moving your plan from one employer to another, etc. If you're self employed or a small business owner paying insurance directly to the tune of $1,200 to $1,400 a month per employee, there are no built-in cost control measures. If you're among the 54% of U.S. employees working for an employer that pays your health costs (self funded health insurance), using the Blue Crosses of the world to simply administer the plan, the savings you have now are, for the most part, what you will have after the "reforms" on the table.
Why? Because there are no cost controls for the underlying service, health care, and profit-driven insurance fees.
The cost saving elements of the bill from electronic records etc. are not going to appear in the next two years, if ever.
Current polling shows that 65% of citizens support "the government offering everyone a government health insurance plan like Medicare." The 10% to 40% that private insurers take out of the system for overhead and profits compares to less than 5% administrative costs for Medicare. By shifting health care costs away from employers to the government as single payer (in line with the rest of the industrialized world), U.S. businesses and workers could compete more effectively at home and abroad. After ten years, we might actually get some new jobs and higher incomes.
Unfortunately, the wisdom and logic of the people are not heeded by Congress and the administration. Government funded single payer health care is an approach forbidden in the current debate. A watered down version is the "public option" which President Obama said would be available to only the uninsured and, even then, on a limited basis. Congress is even talking about the states having public options at their discretion. It's all about getting a bill passed.
Meaningful reform and immediate relief are not on the agenda.
Those in charge think that we're so stupid we won't notice that our health care is either the same or worse should the proposed legislation be made law. Clearly, they think that there's no urgency to address the availability and affordability of health care. A political victory trumps a clear and present set of requirements for the good health of citizens.
It's time that the administration and Congress start behaving like adults and tell the truth.
As of now, the truth is that endless war and endless bailouts are the national priorities. The other key truth, soon to become painfully evident, is that the current health care reform legislation will do little in the near term to relieve the immediate problems of cost availability and affordability. It is faith-based reform that inspires little faith other than among the latest bailout beneficiaries, insurance companies that stand to acquire tens of millions of new customers.
Why isn't the health of citizen the number one priority?
If you had to explain America’s economic success with one word, that word would be “education.” In the 19th century, America led the way in universal basic education. Then, as other nations followed suit, the “high school revolution” of the early 20th century took us to a whole new level. And in the years after World War II, America established a commanding position in higher education.
But that was then. The rise of American education was, overwhelmingly, the rise of public education — and for the past 30 years our political scene has been dominated by the view that any and all government spending is a waste of taxpayer dollars. Education, as one of the largest components of public spending, has inevitably suffered.
Until now, the results of educational neglect have been gradual — a slow-motion erosion of America’s relative position. But things are about to get much worse, as the economic crisis — its effects exacerbated by the penny-wise, pound-foolish behavior that passes for “fiscal responsibility” in Washington — deals a severe blow to education across the board.
About that erosion: there has been a flurry of reporting recently about threats to the dominance of America’s elite universities. What hasn’t been reported to the same extent, at least as far as I’ve seen, is our relative decline in more mundane measures. America, which used to take the lead in educating its young, has been gradually falling behind other advanced countries.
Most people, I suspect, still have in their minds an image of America as the great land of college education, unique in the extent to which higher learning is offered to the population at large. That image used to correspond to reality. But these days young Americans are considerably less likely than young people in many other countries to graduate from college. In fact, we have a college graduation rate that’s slightly below the average across all advanced economies.
Even without the effects of the current crisis, there would be every reason to expect us to fall further in these rankings, if only because we make it so hard for those with limited financial means to stay in school. In America, with its weak social safety net and limited student aid, students are far more likely than their counterparts in, say, France to hold part-time jobs while still attending classes. Not surprisingly, given the financial pressures, young Americans are also less likely to stay in school and more likely to become full-time workers instead.
But the crisis has placed huge additional stress on our creaking educational system.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the United States economy lost 273,000 jobs last month. Of those lost jobs, 29,000 were in state and local education, bringing the total losses in that category over the past five months to 143,000. That may not sound like much, but education is one of those areas that should, and normally does, keep growing even during a recession. Markets may be troubled, but that’s no reason to stop teaching our children. Yet that’s exactly what we’re doing.
There’s no mystery about what’s going on: education is mainly the responsibility of state and local governments, which are in dire fiscal straits. Adequate federal aid could have made a big difference. But while some aid has been provided, it has made up only a fraction of the shortfall. In part, that’s because back in February centrist senators insisted on stripping much of that aid from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a k a the stimulus bill.
As a result, education is on the chopping block. And laid-off teachers are only part of the story. Even more important is the way that we’re shutting off opportunities.
For example, the Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported on the plight of California’s community college students. For generations, talented students from less affluent families have used those colleges as a stepping stone to the state’s public universities. But in the face of the state’s budget crisis those universities have been forced to slam the door on this year’s potential transfer students. One result, almost surely, will be lifetime damage to many students’ prospects — and a large, gratuitous waste of human potential.
So what should be done?
First of all, Congress needs to undo the sins of February, and approve another big round of aid to state governments. We don’t have to call it a stimulus, but it would be a very effective way to create or save thousands of jobs. And it would, at the same time, be an investment in our future.
Beyond that, we need to wake up and realize that one of the keys to our nation’s historic success is now a wasting asset. Education made America great; neglect of education can reverse the process.
Military shuts down all anti-coup radio and TV, silencing all reporting on the resistance movement
Honduras is under martial law as executive decree PCM-M-016-2009 has suspended numerous constitutional freedoms including: personal freedom, the right to free thought, the right to organize and meet, the right to free movement, freedom of the press, rights to privacy in one's own home, and protection against arbitrary detentions. The coup regime has routinely infringed these rights throughout the past three months, but it used the current degree to mobilize the military to shut down all anti-coup media outlets, thus eliminating any news of the resistance from the media. As filmmaker and resistance member Oscar Estrada writes, "it's like we never existed."
Bio
Dr. Luther Castillo is a spokesperson for the National Front Against the Coup, a coalition of various civil society organizations and individuals who oppose the June 28th, 2009 coup in Honduras, and advocate for a popular constitutional assembly as the resolution to the crisis. He has helped organize and lead over 90 straight days of civil disobedience since President Manuel Zelaya was expelled from the country by the military, and the popular consultation on opening the constitution was canceled. Dr. Castillo graduated in 2005 from the Latin American Medical School in Havana, Cuba. He then returned to his homeland of Miskitia on the Honduran coast, where he led construction of Honduras’ first Garifuna Rural Hospital. The project now serves over 20,000 people in the surrounding communities. In 2007, Dr. Castillo was named “Honduran Doctor of the Year” by Rotary International’s Tegucigalpa chapter. He is featured prominently in the award winning documentary Salud.
