FORMER REAGAN ASSISTANT TREASURY SECRETARY SIDES WITH ACLU IN OPPOSING POLICE USE OF DRONES ...AND SEES ELECTION OF RON PAUL AS AMERICA'S ONLY HOPE TO AVERT LIVING IN "A CONCENTRATION CAMP FAR BETTER CONTROLLED THAN THE ONE PORTRAYED BY GEORGE ORWELL IN '1984'"

---

Original Here

America’s Last Chance

---

January 14, 2012 

America has one last chance, and it is a very slim one. Americans can elect Ron Paul President, or they can descend into tyranny.

Why is Ron Paul America’s last chance?

Because he is the only candidate who is not owned lock, stock, and barrel by the military-security complex, Wall Street, and the Israel Lobby.

All of the others, including President Obama, are owned by exactly the same interest groups. There are no differences between them. Every candidate except Ron Paul stands for war and a police state, and all have demonstrated their complete and total subservience to Israel. The fact that there is no difference between them is made perfectly clear by the absence of substantive issues in the campaigns of the Republican candidates.

Only Ron Paul deals with real issues, so he is excluded from “debates” in which the other Republican candidates throw mud at one another: “Gingrich voted $60 million to a UN program supporting abortion in China.” “Romney loves to fire people.”

The mindlessness repels.

More importantly, only Ron Paul respects the US Constitution and its protection of civil liberty. Only Ron Paul understands that if the Constitution cannot be resurrected from its public murder by Congress and the executive branch, then Americans are lost to tyranny.

There isn’t much time in which to revive the Constitution. One more presidential term with no habeas corpus and no due process for US citizens and with torture and assassination of US citizens by their own government, and it will be too late. Tyranny will have been firmly institutionalized, and too many Americans from the lowly to the high and mighty will have been implicated in the crimes of the state. Extensive guilt and complicity will make it impossible to restore the accountability of government to law.

If Ron Paul is not elected president in this year’s election, by 2016 American liberty will be in a forgotten grave in a forgotten grave yard.

Having said this, there is no way Ron Paul can be elected, for these reasons:

Not enough Americans understand that the “war on terror” has been used to create a police state. The brainwashed citizenry believe that the police state is making them safe from terrorists.

Liberals, progressives, and the left-wing oppose Ron Paul, claiming that “he would abolish the social safety net, privatize Social Security and Medicare, throw the widows and orphans into the street, abolish the Federal Reserve,” etc.

Apparently, liberals, progressives, and the left-wing do not understand that privatizing Social Security and Medicare and destroying the social safety net are policies that many conservative Republicans favor and are policies that Wall Street is forcing on both political parties. In contrast, a President Ron Paul would be isolated in the White House and would never be able to muster the support of Congress and the powerful interest groups to achieve such radical changes. Moreover, Ron Paul has made it clear that a welfare-free state cannot be achieved by decree but only by creating an economy in which opportunity exists for people to stand on their own feet. Ron Paul has said that he does not support ending welfare before an economy is created that makes a welfare state unnecessary.

Candidate Paul cannot take any steps to reassure Americans that he would not throw them to the mercy of the free market, because his libertarian base would turn on him as another unprincipled politician willing to sacrifice his principles for political expediency.

If libertarians were not inflexible, candidate Paul could endorse Ron Unz’s proposal to solve the illegal immigration problem by raising the minimum wage to $12 an hour, so that Americans could afford to work the jobs that are taken by illegals.

Economist James K. Galbraith is probably correct that Unz’s proposal would boost the economy by injecting purchasing power and that the unemployment would be largely confined to illegals who would return to their home country. However, if Ron Paul were to treat Unz’s proposal as one worthy of study and consideration, libertarian ideologues would write him off. Whatever liberal/progressive support he gained would be offset by the loss of his libertarian base.

Why can’t libertarians be as intelligent as Ron Unz and see that if the Constitution is lost all that remains is tyranny?

In short, Americans cannot see beyond their ideologies to the real issue, which is the choice between the Constitution and tyranny.

So we hear absurd accusations that Ron Paul, a libertarian “is a racist.” “Ron Paul is an anti-semite.” “Ron Paul would favor the rich and hurt the poor.”

We don’t hear “Ron Paul would restore and protect the US Constitution.”

What do Americans think life will be like in the absence of the Constitution? I will tell you what it will be like, but first let’s consider the obstacles Ron Paul would face if he were to win the Republican nomination and if he were to be elected president.

In my opinion, if Ron Paul were to win the Republican nomination, the Republican Party would conspire to refuse it to him. The party would simply nominate a different candidate.

If despite everything, Ron Paul were to end up in the White House, he would not be able to form a government that would support his policies. Appointments to cabinet secretaries and assistant secretaries that would support his policies could not be confirmed by the US Senate. President Paul would have to appoint whomever the Senate would confirm in order to form a government. The Senate’s appointees would undermine his policies.

What a President Ron Paul could do, assuming Congress, controlled by powerful private interest groups, did not impeach him on trumped up charges, would be to use whatever forums that might be permitted him to explain to the public, judges, and law schools that the danger from terrorists is miniscule compared to the danger from a government unaccountable to law and the Constitution.

The reason we should vote for Ron Paul is to signal to the powers that be that we understand what they are doing to us. If Paul were to receive a large vote, it could have two good effects. One could be to introduce some caution into the establishment that would slow the march into more war and tyranny. The other is it would signal to Washington’s European and Japanese puppets that not all Americans are stupid sheep. Such an indication could make Washington’s puppet states more cautious and less cooperative with Washington’s drive for world hegemony.

What America Without the Constitution Will Be Like

In the January 4 Huff Post, attorney and author John Whitehead reported on the militarization of local police. Some police forces are now equipped with spy drones. Whitehead reports that a drone manufacturer, AeroVironment Inc., plans to sell 18,000 drones to police departments throughout the country. The company is also advertising a small drone, the “Switchblade,” which can track a person, land on the person and explode.

How long before Americans will be spied upon or murdered as extremists at the discretion of local police?

Recognizing the privacy danger, if not the murder danger, the American Civil Liberties Union has issued a report, “Protecting Privacy From Aerial Surveillance.” https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/protectingprivacyfromaerialsurveillance.pdf

The ACLU believes, correctly, that liberty is threatened by “a surveillance society in which our every move is monitored, tracked, recorded, and scrutinized by authorities.”

The ACLU calls on Congress to legislate privacy protections against the police use of drones. I support the ACLU because it is the most important defender of civil liberty despite other misguided activities, but I wonder what the ACLU is thinking. Congress and the federal courts have already acquiesced in the federal government’s warrantless spying on Americans by the National Security Agency. The Bush regime violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act many times, and all involved, including President Bush, should have been sent to prison for many lifetimes, as each violation carries a 5-year prison term. But the executive branch emerged scot free. No one was held accountable for clear violations of US statutory law.

The ACLU might think that although the federal executive branch has successfully elevated itself above the law, state and local police forces are still accountable. We must hope that they are, but I doubt it.

The militarization of local police has received some attention. What has not received attention is that state and local police are also being federalized. It is not only military armaments and spy technology that local police are receiving from Washington, but also an attitude toward the public along with federal oversight and the collaboration that goes with it. When Homeland Security, a federal police force, comes into states, as I know has occurred in Georgia and Tennessee, and doubtless other states, and together with the state police stop cars and trucks on Interstate highways and subject them to warrantless searches, what is happening is the de facto deputizing of the state police by Homeland Security. This is the way that Goering and Himmler federalized into the Gestapo the independent police forces of German provinces such as Prussia and Bavaria.

Homeland Security has expanded its warrantless searches far beyond “airline security.”

The budding gestapo agency now conducts warrantless searches on the nation’s highways, on bus and train passengers, and at Social Security offices. On Tuesday January 3, 2012, the Social Security office in Leesburg, Florida, apparently a terrorist hotspot, became a Homeland Security checkpoint. The DHS Gestapo armed with automatic weapons and sniffer dogs demanded IDs from local residents visiting their local Social Security office. http://www.dailycommercial.com/News/LakeCounty/010412shield

Thomas Milligan, district manager for the Social Security Administration office, said staff were not informed their offices were about to be stormed by armed federal police officers. DHS officials refused to answer questions asked by local media and left with no explanation at noon, reports infowars.com.

The DHS gestapo justified its takeover of a Leesburg Florida Social Security office as being an integral part of “Operational Shield,” conducted by the Federal Protective Service to detect “the presence of unauthorized persons and potentially disruptive or dangerous activities.”

One wonders if even brainwashed flag-waving “superpatriots” can miss the message. The Social Security office of Leesburg, Florida, population 19,086 in central Florida is not a place where terrorists devoid of proper ID might be visiting. To protect America from the scant possibility that terrorists might be congregating at the Leesburg Social Security office, the tyrants in Washington sent the Federal Protective Service at who knows what cost to demand ID from locals visiting their Social Security office.

What is this all about except to establish the precedent that federal police, a new entity in American life, the Federal Protective Service, has authority over state and local police offices and can appear out of the blue to interrogate local citizens.

Why the ACLU thinks it is going to get any action out of a Congress that has accommodated the executive branch’s destruction of habeas corpus, due process, and the constitutional and legal prohibitions against torture is beyond me. But at least the issue is raised. But don’t expect to hear about it from the “mainstream media.”

Americans in 2012, although only a few are aware, live in a concentration camp that is far better controlled than the one portrayed by George Orwell in 1984. Orwell, writing in the late 1940s could not imagine the technology that makes control of populations so thorough as it is today. Orwell’s protagonist could at least have hope. In 2012 with the erasure of privacy by the US government, protagonists can be eliminated by hummingbird-sized drones before they can initiate a protest, much less a rebellion.

Never in human history has a people been so easily and willingly controlled by a hostile government as Americans, who are the least free people on earth. And a large percentage of Americans still wave the flag and chant USA! USA! USA!

The Bush regime operated as if the Constitution did not exist. Any semblance of constitutional government that remained after the Bush years was terminated when Congress passed and President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act. One wonders how the National Rifle Association, the defender of the Second Amendment, will now fare. If there is no Constitution, how can there be a Second Amendment? If the President, at his discretion, can set aside habeas corpus and due process and murder citizens based on unproven suspicions, why can’t he set aside the Second Amendment?

Indeed, it is folly to expect a police state to tolerate an armed population.

The NRA is very supportive of the police and military. Now that these armed organizations are being turned against the public, how will the NRA adjust its posture?

Many NRA members, pointing to the “Oath Keepers,” former members of the military who pledge to defend the Constitution, and to police chiefs who support the Second Amendment, believe that the police and military will disobey orders to attack citizens.

But we already witness constantly the gratuitous brutality of “our” police against peaceful protesters. We witness military troops all over the world murder citizens who protest government abuses. Why can’t it happen here?

If you don’t want it to happen here, you had better figure out some way to get Ron Paul into the Presidency and to get him a cabinet and subcabinet that will support him.

Meanwhile, the police state grows. On January 4, 2012, the Obama regime announced by decree, not by legislation, the creation of the Bureau of Counterterrorism which will among other tasks “seek to strengthen homeland security, countering violent extremism.” http://newsok.com/obama-launches-bureau-of-counterterrorism/article/feed/332475

Take a moment to think. Do you know of any “violent extremism” happening in the US?

The regime is telling you that it needs a new police bureau with unaccountable powers to “strengthen homeland security” against a nonexistent bogyman.

So who will be the violent extremists who require countering by the Bureau of Counterterrorism? It will be peace activists, the Occupy Wall Street protesters, the unemployed and foreclosed homeless. It will be whoever the police state says. And there is no due process or recourse to law.

Given the facts before you, you are out of your mind if you think Ron Paul’s rhetoric against the welfare state is more important than his defense of liberty.

IN TUCSON ALL POLITICAL PARTIES UNITE IN FIGHTING ELECTIONS RIGGED BY INSIDERS

---

Original Here

Audit AZ takes transparent election fight to court

fox11az.com

Posted on January 13, 2012 at 11:15 AM

Updated yesterday at 11:23 AM

TUCSON, Ariz. -- A non-partisan organization in Tucson is on a mission to make sure future

Pima County elections are done fairly.

Audit AZ says its long battle with the county, stemming from voting irregularities in a 2006 election for the Regional Transportation Authority, is finally going before a jury.

It's an essential part in our election process.

Technology is used to compile voters lists, draw electoral boundaries and count the ballots.

But some Tucsonans say it's getting in the way.

"We want the court to order certain things that would prevent Pima County from cheating again in the future," said Bill Risner.

Bill Risner is a lawyer representing Audit AZ, Americans United for Democracy, Integrity and Transparency in Elections.

It's working to prove the county used voting machines to rig a 2006 election that passed a 20 year RTA project and half cent sales tax to help fund it.

"It seems they pretended it passed, when it didn't," said Risner.

The case is now heading to a jury, but the county says it doesn't stand a chance.

"Their accusations are pretty silly and ludicrous," said Chuck Huckleberry.

County Administrator Chuck Huckleberry says taking their fight to court is a waste of time and money.

"There has been a complete recount of all the ballots by the Attorney General, there has been a full investigation, there is no voter fraud," said Huckleberry.

But Audit AZ and its supporters believe in their cause. Since 2012 is such an important election year, they want a judge to order a change in the system as soon as possible.

"Because our system is used in other counties in other states, we'd like to do it sufficiently in advance so it would be the most good for the people," said Risner.

To fix the election process, Audit AZ is proposing an independent graphic scanning of all ballots.

The images would be posted on a public website after the polls close, so anyone could count the ballots.

OP-ED COLUMNIST

America’s Unlevel Field

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: January 8, 2012


Last month President Obama gave a speech invoking the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt on behalf of progressive ideals — and Republicans were not happy. Mitt Romney, in particular, insisted that where Roosevelt believed that “government should level the playing field to create equal opportunities,” Mr. Obama believes that “government should create equal outcomes,” that we should have a society where “everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to take risk.”

As many people were quick to point out, this portrait of the president as radical redistributionist was pure fiction. What hasn’t been as widely noted, however, is that Mr. Romney’s picture of himself as a believer in a level playing field is just as fictional. Where is the evidence that he or his party cares at all about equality of opportunity?

Let’s talk for a minute about the actual state of the playing field.

Americans are much more likely than citizens of other nations to believe that they live in a meritocracy. But this self-image is a fantasy: as a report in The Times last week pointed out, America actually stands out as the advanced country in which it matters most who your parents were, the country in which those born on one of society’s lower rungs have the least chance of climbing to the top or even to the middle.

And if you ask why America is more class-bound in practice than the rest of the Western world, a large part of the reason is that our government falls down on the job of creating equal opportunity.

The failure starts early: in America, the holes in the social safety net mean that both low-income mothers and their children are all too likely to suffer from poor nutrition and receive inadequate health care. It continues once children reach school age, where they encounter a system in which the affluent send their kids to good, well-financed public schools or, if they choose, to private schools, while less-advantaged children get a far worse education.

Once they reach college age, those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds are far less likely to go to college — and vastly less likely to go to a top-tier school — than those luckier in their parentage. At the most selective, “Tier 1” schools, 74 percent of the entering class comes from the quarter of households that have the highest “socioeconomic status”; only 3 percent comes from the bottom quarter.

And if children from our society’s lower rungs do manage to make it into a good college, the lack of financial support makes them far more likely to drop out than the children of the affluent, even if they have as much or more native ability. One long-term study by the Department of Education found that students with high test scores but low-income parents were less likely to complete college than students with low scores but affluent parents — loosely speaking, that smart poor kids are less likely than dumb rich kids to get a degree.

It’s no wonder, then, that Horatio Alger stories, tales of poor kids who make good, are much less common in reality than they are in legend — and much less common in America than they are in Canada or Europe. Which brings me back to those, like Mr. Romney, who claim to believe in equality of opportunity. Where is the evidence for that claim?

Think about it: someone who really wanted equal opportunity would be very concerned about the inequality of our current system. He would support more nutritional aid for low-income mothers-to-be and young children. He would try to improve the quality of public schools. He would support aid to low-income college students. And he would support what every other advanced country has, a universal health care system, so that nobody need worry about untreated illness or crushing medical bills.

If Mr. Romney has come out for any of these things, I’ve missed it. And the Congressional wing of his party seems determined to make upward mobility even harder. For example, Republicans have tried to slash funds for the Women, Infants and Children program, which helps provide adequate nutrition to low-income mothers and their children; they have demanded cuts in Pell grants, which are designed to help lower-income students afford college.

And they have, of course, pledged to repeal a health reform that, for all its imperfections, would finally give Americans the guaranteed care that everyone else in the advanced world takes for granted.

So where is the evidence that Mr. Romney or his party actually believes in equal opportunity? Judging by their actions, they seem to prefer a society in which your station in life is largely determined by that of your parents — and in which the children of the very rich get to inherit their estates tax-free. Teddy Roosevelt would not have approved.

» The Dismal Economic Outlook For The New Year

---

By: Paul Craig Roberts| January 6, 2012 |

Jobs offshoring, financial deregulation, and ten years of wars have severely damaged the US economy and the economic prospects of 90% of the American population. The signs are everywhere in front of our eyes. They are in the income distribution data, the BLS jobs data, the Census data, the poverty figures, and the high number of food stamp recipients.

The signs are in the foreclosed and boarded up homes and the accompanying homelessness. They are in closed strip malls, in office building, warehouse, and shopping mall vacancies, and in the huge population losses of America’s manufacturing cities.

The New Economy was a hoax, like Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” and the “war on terror.” Americans were deceived by “their” corrupt government, by greed-driven corporations, and by corporate shills among economists and the pundit class into believing that they were trading middle class “dirty fingernail” jobs in manufacturing for better middle class “clean fingernail” high-tech service jobs. Instead, reasonably paid manufacturing and professional skill jobs, such as software engineering and information technology, were traded for lowly paid jobs as waitresses and bartenders and for jobs in ambulatory health care.

Consequently, real median US income fell for the vast majority of the population. To keep consumers spending when they had no raises, the Federal Reserve used low interest rates to create a real estate and credit bubble. The low interest rates drove up housing prices, and Americans refinanced their mortgages and spent the equity in their homes. Americans maxed out credit cards. The rise in consumer indebtedness kept consumer demand growing and the economy afloat.

But there is a limit to how far debt can outpace income, and the bubble burst. And when it burst the financial fraud that had been hidden in the euphoria was revealed. That set off the financial crisis.

As the US government is controlled by financial and armaments interests and not by the people, the government responded to the financial crisis by shoveling more debt and more hardships on the American people in order that financial interests did not have to pay for their own mistakes and crimes. Instead of blaming the responsible parties, “our” government handed the bill to the American people.

An important part of the bill is the huge number of new dollars being created in order to keep “banks too big to fail” afloat and in order to finance the federal government’s enormous budget deficit from its illegal wars. Sooner or later, the proliferation of dollars will cost the American people sharply higher prices.

We will return to the dollar crisis later in this column. First, lets look at what the loss of manufacturing and manufacturing related jobs have done to the economy and the prospects of US citizens.

In the first decade of the 21st century, Detroit, Michigan, lost 25% of its population. Gary, Indiana, lost 22%. Flint, Michigan, lost 18%. Cleveland, Ohio, lost 17%. In St. Louis, Missouri, 19% of the housing is vacant. These population losses were not the result of the Black Plague or killer viruses or a nuclear attack. They were the result of corporate CEOs, pushed by their own greed, by the greed of Wall Street and that of large retailers such as Wal-Mart, aided and abetted by “our” government, into moving millions of manufacturing, software engineering, information technology, engineering, research, development, and design jobs offshore.

The process of moving American jobs offshore left cities, counties, and states with shrunken tax base.The resulting state and local budget deficits are being used to dismantle public sector unions and to cut social services. Public assets, such as water companies, and future income streams from parking meters, toll roads and bridges, are being sold off to foreign buyers in order to insure another year of local and state government solvency.

In the first decade of the 21st century, Americans lost 5,500,000 manufacturing jobs. US employment in the manufacture of computer and electronic products fell by 40%; in the production of machinery by 30%, in motor vehicles and and parts by 44%, and in the manufacture of clothing by 66%.

In other words, in ten years the US economy was decimated by jobs offshoring for the sole purpose of higher rewards to capital in the form of multi-million dollar executive bonuses and large shareholder capital gains. A few hedge fund executives were paid a billion dollars in annual renumeration and a couple of dozen of them were paid $500 million in annual compensation. What sense does that make? Huge fortunes paid for one year’s work, not in productive activity but in destroying the financial system and the value of pensions that tens of millions of Americans had worked their lives to achieve.

While this was happening, “our” government squandered several trillion dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan on wars based on lies and deception. The American people were lied to and deceived, and continue to be, in order that arms industries can enjoy record profits and in order that crazed neoconservative war criminals could pursue their ideology of world hegemony and empire. We were even lied to about US war casualties. As Dennis Loo points out in his book, Globalization and the Demolition of Society (2011), the 4,801 Americans killed in action in Iraq leaves out the 50,000 suicides of veterans and active duty US troops. The truth of the matter is that the casualties of the Iraq war are as high as those of the Vietnam war.

With all income gains redirected to the financial and war sectors, the distribution of income in the US has become, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the worst of all developed countries. The Central Intelligence Agency--yes, the CIA--concluded that America had achieved not only the worst income distribution of all developed countries but also a worst income distribution than Iran, Cambodia, Uganda, Nicaragua, Russia, and China. https://cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2172rank.html

The economic “recovery” that Washington and the financial press hype is all talk and no reality. The “recovery” is produced by understating the inflation rate, which overstates GDP growth, and by dropping the long-term unemployed out of the measurement of unemployment. An economy, the driving engine of which has been moved offshore, cannot recover unless the economy is brought back home, and that requires the repeal of Globalism.

Overstatement is common in order to produce good news, but eventually it catches up with the spinmeisters. Last month the National Association of Realtors reported that it had overstated home sales by 3.5 million. Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reports that the “birth/death” model, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses to estimate the net affect on jobs data of unreported business closures and new start-ups, overstates the annual number of new jobs during troubled economic times by approximately one million jobs annually. Each year the accumulated monthly overstatements are quietly revised away by BLS.

Similarly, data can be understated in order to hide bad news. The understatement of inflation results from basing the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on substitution rather than on a fixed basket of goods, the traditional method. During the “progressive” Clinton regime, a deceptive change was made to the CPI. If the price of a good rises, for example, sirloin steak, the higher price does not appear in the index. Instead, the CPI assumes that consumers switch from sirloin to a cheaper cut, such as round steak. Thus, the rise in prices is negated by substituting goods that represent a lower standard of living.

By understating inflation, the government has been able to produce a “recovery,” when in fact the positive economic growth number is created by counting inflation or nominal GDP growth as real GDP growth. John Williams says that when inflation is measured in the old way, prior to Clinton, the US has experienced essentially no real GDP growth in the 21st century. In other words, we have had a decade of essentially no growth in the GDP while the presstitutes in the media proclaim “recovery.”

The government’s forecasts of its budget deficits are based on the assumption that an economic recovery is underway. If in fact there is no recovery and the economy is about to worsen, the trillion dollar plus deficits that the government forecasts for as far as the eye can see will be even larger. As more debt creation likely means more money creation by the Federal Reserve, the future purchasing power of the US dollar appears to be dismal.

The federal government’s reckless issuance of debt in order to finance its hegemonic wars and the Federal Reserve’s misuse of its authority to create $16.1 trillion in secret loans to US and European banks (as revealed by the GAO audit of the Fed) have created an enormous number of new dollars. In addition, financial deregulation has resulted in banks creating paper claims on real assets that far exceed the value of the underlying real assets. This is an untenable situation. How is it likely to be resolved?

This is a two-part question: there is the banks’ debt and there is the federal government’s debt. Both are serious problems.

Mortgage-backed derivatives exceed the value of the homes, and Credit Default Swaps and other financial innovations have resulted in the paper claims on assets exceeding the value of the underlying real assets. Consider Credit Default Swaps, a form of unreserved “insurance.” Investors, really speculators, do not have to own a Greek government bond or a mortgage-backed derivative in order to purchase a “swap” that insures its value. Thus, the total value of swaps issued on Greek bonds, for example, can far exceed the total value of Greek bonds. The value of swaps issued on mortgage-backed securities can exceed the total value of mortgaged real estate.

Financial institutions, such as US banks, that sold “swaps” on Greek bonds were gambling that Greece would be bailed out and would not default. The financial institutions regarded as gravy the fees paid to them for “guarantees” on which they cannot make good. I don’t know the extent of swaps on sovereign debt, but I recently saw a report that the Bank of America alone has sold $2.1 trillion in swaps on sovereign debt. Imagine the crisis if the Bank of America had to pay off these swaps.

Obviously, if European sovereign debt blows up, the US financial crisis will become deeper.

The GAO audit of the Federal Reserve showed that the Fed made secret loans to banks of $16.1 trillion between December 2007 and June 2010. To put that figure in perspective, it is larger than the US GDP and larger than the US public debt. In other words, it took a tremendous amount of new money to keep the financial system from collapsing. Despite this huge sum pumped into the banking system, the banks are still regarded as weak and troubled. The insecurity of bank depositors is reflected in the one basis point interest rate on Treasury bill money funds. Many Americans are willing to receive a negative interest rate in order to have their money in instruments that can be paid off with newly created money.

When the paper claims on assets exceed the value of the underlying assets, one solution could be slow write downs of bad paper over time as the banks’ profits permit. This would require suspending the mark-to-market rule and permitting the banks to remain “solvent” by counting bad assets as good until profits permitted write-downs.

This would be a sensible solution if the banks have profitable prospects. But with consumers too indebted and broke to borrow and the consumer market too impaired for good sales prospects for businesses, what profitable prospects do banks have? Only those created by the Federal Reserve’s support of the “carry trade,” the ability of financial institutions to borrow from the Federal Reserve at essentially zero interest rates and to put the money in Greek and Italian sovereign debt. This is gambling, otherwise known as “casino banking.”

If reality rules out the solution of gradual write-downs, all that remains is bankruptcy or inflation. The Federal Reserve and the US government have ruled out permitting the banks to fail. That leaves inflation.

Except for a relatively few indexed Treasury bonds, financial instruments are in nominal values. Thus bad debts can be inflated away by driving up the nominal values of the underlying real assets and the nominal values of wages and salaries. It seems that the path that policymakers are taking is to reduce the purchasing power of money in order to drive up nominal asset values so that they exceed the claims against them.

For example, consider a person with a $200,000 mortgage whose home, if he could sell it, is only worth $175,000. This person’s asset is under water. However, if inflation drives up the price of his home to $250,000, the person has gone from a balance sheet $25,000 in the red to one $50,000 in the black. It seems clear that in order to save the financial institutions and itself, the government will sacrifice the purchasing power of the dollar.

Thus, the same solution appears to be in effect for the government’s growing debt. For the moment the US dollar is benefitting from flight from the euro due to the hyped sovereign debt crisis in Europe. As in the past, a scared financial world takes refuge in the dollar and in US Treasury debt instruments. The main difference between Greece’s indebtedness and America’s is that Greece cannot print euros, but the US can print dollars. Thus holders of US debt can always get back the nominal dollar value of Treasury debt issues. Of course, the real purchasing power of these printed dollars can be very low.

The dollar as a refuge is a short-run phenomenon. Once the transfer out of euros into dollars has occurred, how does the Treasury sell the next round of bonds to finance trillion dollar deficits? Sooner or later the Federal Reserve will be back to monetizing the new Treasury bond issues, that is, the Federal Reserve will create new money with which to purchase the new Treasury bond issues.

Sooner or later the new money will find its way into the economy and drive up prices, or the continual monetization of new US Treasury debt will cause the world to lose confidence in the dollar. Heavy sales of US dollars in currency markets would drive down the exchange value of the dollar and raise the prices of imports such as energy, manufactured goods, and food. Either way inflation is the result. Indeed, both can occur together, which is the likely result.

Normally, inflation is associated with a booming economy, but as too much of the US economy has been moved offshore, there is little left to boom other than prices. Therefore, the combination of high inflation with high unemployment is a likely fate that awaits Americans.

I cannot predict how long policymakers can hold economic armageddon at bay with spin, money creation, currency swaps, intervention in gold and silver markets, and outright lies. The onset could be sudden and take place this year, but we shouldn’t underestimate the power of spin over a gullible public that trusts “their” government and fervently believes that Muslim terrorists are out to get them and that the demise of the Constitution, the product of a eight hundred year struggle that produced Anglo-American civil liberty, is worth the price of “safety.”

There is no safety in a police state and a debauched currency. The comfortable world that Americans have known is falling apart at the seams.

LOST IN TOKYO: APOLITICAL BUT WELL WORTH THE WATCH (AND PURE NOSTALGIA FOR ONE WHO SPENT A YEAR THERE)

---

Lost in Tokyo

by Mark Bramley

8 days ago

Lost in Tokyo from Mark Bramley on Vimeo.

Had 2 days to myself in Tokyo so I decided to take about 10,000 photos. All shot on a Canon 5D MkII. All the video footage was shot handheld.

Music is by GMZ - Parametaphoriquement

You can check out more of my photography here:

markbramley.com

CAPITAL ACCOUNT: THE WASHINGTON DC OFFICE OF A NEWS SERVICE BASED IN RUSSIA GETS TO THE HEART OF MATTERS AFFECTING THE WORLD'S ECONOMIES

Capital Account can be accessed here and subscribed to if you wish.

I have known of Russia Today (RT) from videos I had come across at random.  But it was only a few days ago I that was clued in to Capital Account by Paul Craig Roberts, an economist who was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Ronald Reagan and occasionally picks bones with with Keynsian economists.  However, in the present-day state of the world's economy, PCR explicitly recommended the videos below of interviews with Keynsian economists Michael Hudson and Bill Black, presumably because he agrees with their analyses. The host and commentator of Capital Account, Lauren Lyster, is incredibly well versed in issues affecting the economy. I confess that I haven't watched the U.S. "mainstream media" news analyses in a month of Sundays, so I hope that some readers of this post who have will append comments on their impressions of the similarities and differences.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_profilepage&v=zJhGExuAmtE

Michael Hudson, "Technocrats are Lobbyists for the Wall Street Gang"

12/07/11


While the failure of MF Global (together with its CEO Jon Corzine) is at the center of the present discussion, it is not the only large financial institution that lacks the collateral to cover it's gambling debts. Indeed, all of the large banks in the U.S. and many of those in Europe are presently on "life support," to pick a metaphor.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_profilepage&v=hHcMKxp30gs
William K. Black: Justice Department is the Dog that has Refused to Bark for a Decade
12/08/11



http://www.youtube.com/user/CapitalAccount?feature=watch#p/f/14/xFlV_js4j_o

Gerald Celente, "They are Robbing Celente to pay the Goldman Sachs Gang"

12/13/11


Unlike the videos above, the following is a full length show.

Jon Corzine, CEO of MF Global (and former CEO of Goldman Sachs, U.S. Senator, and New Jersey Governor), apparently presided over MF Global's taking money from customer savings accounts for use as collateral for a speculative "investments" by the supposedly-segregated investment division, which lost big time. American Farmers and airlines are among the victims. Many of the European banks are in the same situation. The fall in gold prices is viewed by interviewee Karl Denninger as being the result of the big banks in this situation selling off all their tangible assets to cover a landslide of withdrawals from savings accounts.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_profilepage&v=P0N_tHh8f4U

Capital Account: Gold sinking, Dollar rising - are we facing a Financial Crisis worse than 2008?

12/15/11

CHEMTRAILS: A MONSTROUS CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE 99% BY SELF-SERVING MEMBERS OF THE 1% -- A CONSPIRACY DECRIED BY DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS ALIKE, AS WELL AS INTERNATIONALLY ...BUT IT NEEDS YOUR ATTENTION TOO!

Chemtrails above the Catalina Mountains near Tucson (photo credit the blogger)

Chemtrails over the Brittany coast in France (photo credit the blogger)

Chemtrail over San Carlos Mexico [note normal contrail of the legitimate jetliner coincidentally emerging at upper right]  (photo credit the blogger)

Four Must See Videos, Three Short and one Long:

The young lady first interviewed in the short video below shows good common sense and is perfectly right about normal jet aircraft contrails evaporating in a short period of time. In fact, normal contrails comprise tiny ice particles condensed from the water vapor present in the turbofan engine exhaust, forming a trailing "cloud" until inevitably sublimating (like dry ice) back into the vapor phase.  At the end of this news report, Georgia Tech "weather researcher"  Dr. Jim Saint George surely should have known that, but instead he seems to assert that there are no chemtrails, only contrails.  So one must assume Jim was the designated "conspiracy theory debunker" of the so called "mainstream media," whose job it is to cover up government crimes.

Update 6/23/13. The original video embedded immediately below and described above was subsequently withdrawn due to alleged copyright issues.  The presently available replacement that I substitute below has been altered to give the viewer the impression that only kooky "conspiracy theorists" believe that chemtrails are different from contrails.  Again, I applaud the young lady for getting it right and condemn the "mainstream media" for becoming the propaganda arm of our criminal government. 

http://youtu.be/BZKgnwAgZbY
Chemtrails in the News February 2011 (CBS)

Below we see a clear video of what looks to be a U.S. Air Force KC-10 mid-air-refueling tanker spewing chemtrails from nozzles (circled in green) well separated from its three turbofan engines (circled in yellow).

http://youtu.be/kh7qA2tqQ5c

Chemtrail Spraying Up Close; Definitive Proof - This Must Stop

In the next short video you can see for yourself the difference between normal contrails and chemtrails.  Chemtrails do not sublimate because (as you will learn in the last video) they comprise mainly hard particles of alumina, i.e., aluminum oxide (Al2O3), in very small "aerosol" sizes, which tend to stay suspended in the air for long periods of time like dust in a dust storm.

http://youtu.be/ZL_nkKFXCGE

Don't believe in chemtrails? Watch this! Watch the sky heads Up!

Here below is a full-length video, which I urge everyone to find the time to view. 

It starts off at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego, where one of the sessions dealt with "geoengineering" and global warming.  There one scientist, David Keith, reported that aerosol particles are being put into the stratosphere supposedly as a way of reversing global warming (although others in this film express their believe that there could be political reasons for chemtrails, perhaps even "a global conspiracy").  Under questioning, Dr. Keith finally admitted that the aerosol particles in question consist of alumina and that no research at all had been done on the effects of such aerosols on humans who breath or swallow them, which he supposed "could be something terrible." The film next visits solar expert Dane Wigington and USGS Biologist Francis Mangels at an ecological reserve in Northern California.  They performed tests of snow from the summit of nearby Mt. Shasta, finding 61,100 parts per billion (ppb) aluminum (61 times over the government limit, yet hikers are drinking it), 83 ppb barium, and 383 ppb strontium ...and that the amount of alumina had escalated 50,000 times within the previous five years, during which time the sky had been made hazy by daily chemtrails.  Next you will meet former Arizona State Senator Karen Johnson, a Republican who has studied these issues in detail and, fearing for her 35 grandchildren, is ready to "stand up and fight" against those who are dropping these dangerous chemicals on us.  Then we are taken to Hawaii, where native plants are dying and those who live there can no longer see the horizon due to daily chemtrailing.  One woman had her young daughter's hair analyzed, finding a startling aluminum excess.  There is no refuge in organic foods, since the alumina falls everywhere.  It is very likely that Monsanto's known development of genetically modifed seeds capable of growing in alumina-rich soils is no coincidence.  Finally, we go to Belgium where we meet Peter Vereeke, who was on the city council and later mayor of Evergem, and has now dedicated himself to ending chemtrails -- beginning by his arranging the first International Chemtrail Conference.

http://youtu.be/jf0khstYDLA

What in the World Are They Spraying? (Full Length)

PAUL CRAG ROBERTS OPENS THE NEW YEAR WITH A NEW WEB SITE AND A GLOOMY OUTLOOK FOR THE 99% SO FAR AS LIBERTY IS CONCERNED: "THERE IS NO FREEDOM, NO DEMOCRACY, NO LIBERTY. WHAT STANDS BEFORE US IS NAKED TYRANNY."

The blogger recommends that you visit his new site and sign up for his News Letter, which informs you by e-mail of each new post.

---

The Outlook for the New Year

---

By: Paul Craig Roberts| December 31, 2011

In March 2010 when I resigned from my column with Creator’s Syndicate and put down my pen, I received so many protests from readers that two months later I began writing again. This renewed activity has resulted in this new year in a website of my own.

My columns will first appear on my site. Sites on which readers are accustomed to find my columns are permitted to continue to post my columns as long as they link to my site and indicate my copyright. The site will stay up if reader support justifies it. Otherwise, I will conclude that the cost of the site exceeds the value of what I have to say.

This past year has not been a good one for the 99%, and the new year is likely to be even worse. This column deals with the outlook for liberty. The next will deal with the economic outlook.

The outlook for liberty is dismal. Those writers who are critical of Washington’s illegal wars and overthrow of the US Constitution could find themselves in indefinite detainment, because criticism of Washington’s policies can be alleged to be aiding Washington’s enemies, which might include charities that provide aid to bombed Palestinian children and flotillas that attempt to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/24/us-israel-usa-flotilla-idUSTRE75N4A620110624

The Bush/Obama regimes have put the foundation in place for imprisoning critics of the government without due process of law. The First Amendment is being all but restricted to rah-rah Americans who chant USA! USA! USA! Washington has set itself up as world prosecutor, forever berating other countries for human rights violations, while Washington alone bombs half a dozen countries into the stone age and threatens several more with the same treatment, all the while violating US statutory law and the Geneva Conventions by torturing detainees. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2008/06/18/41514/general-who-probed-abu-ghraib.html

Washington rounds up assorted foreign politicians, whose countries were afflicted with civil wars, and sends them off to be tried as war criminals, while its own war crimes continue to mount. However, if a person exposes Washington’s war crimes, that person is held without charges in conditions that approximate torture.

Bradley Manning is the case in point. Manning, a US soldier, is alleged to be the person who released to WikiLeaks the “Collateral Murder” video, which, in the words of Marjorie Cohn, “depicts U.S. forces in an Apache helicopter killing 12 unarmed civilians, including two Reuters journalists. People trying to rescue the wounded were also fired upon and killed.”

One of the Good Samaritans was a father with two small children. The video reveals the delight that US military personnel experienced in blowing them away from the distant skies. When it became clear that the Warriors Bringing The People Democracy had blown away two small children, instead of remorse we hear an executioner’s voice saying: “that’s what he gets for bringing children into a war zone.”

The quote is from memory, but it is accurate enough. When I first saw this video, I was astonished at the brazen war crime. It is completely obvious that the dozen or so murdered people were simply people walking along a street, threatening no one, unarmed, doing nothing out of the ordinary. It was not a war zone. The horror is that the US soldiers were playing video games with live people. You can tell from their commentary that they were having fun by killing these unsuspecting people walking along the street. They enjoyed killing the father who stopped to help and shooting up his vehicle with the two small children inside.

This was not an accident of a drone, fed with bad information, blowing up a school full of children, or a hospital, or a farmer’s family. This was American soldiers having fun with high tech toys killing anyone that they could pretend might be an enemy.

When I saw this, I realized that America was lost. Evil had prevailed.

I was about to write that nothing has been done about the crime. But something was done about it. An American soldier who recognized the horrific war crime knew that the US military knew about it and had done nothing about it. He also knew that as a US soldier he was required to report war crimes. But to whom? War crimes dismissed as “collateral damage” are the greatest part of Washington’s 21st century wars.

A soldier with a moral conscience gave the video to WikiLeaks. We don’t know who the soldier is. Washington alleges that the soldier is Bradley Manning, but Washington lies every time it opens its mouth. So we will never know.

All we know is that retribution did not fall on the perpetrators of the war crime. It fell upon the two accused of revealing it--Bradley Manning and Julian Assange.

Manning was held almost two years without charges being presented to a court.

In December’s pre-trial hearings all Washington could come up with was concocted accusations. No evidence whatsoever. The prosecutor, a Captain Fein, told the court, if that is what it is, that Manning had been “trained and trusted to use multiple intelligence systems, and he used that training to defy that trust. He abused our trust.”

In other words, Manning gave the world the truth of a war crime that was being covered up, and Washington and the Pentagon regard a truth teller doing his duty under the US military code as an “abuser of trust.”

In the 1970 My Lai Courts-Martial of Captain Ernest L. Medina, the Prosecution Brief states:

“ A combat commander has a duty, both as an individual and as a commander, to insure that humane treatment is accorded to noncombatants and surrendering combatants. Article 3 of the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War specifically prohibits violence to life and person, particularly murder, mutilation, cruel treatment, and torture. Also prohibited are the taking of hostages, outrages against personal dignity and summary judgment and sentence. It demands that the wounded and sick be cared for. These same provisions are found in the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War. While these requirements for humanitarian treatment are placed upon each individual involved with the protected persons, it is especially incumbent upon the commanding officer to insure that proper treatment is given.

“ Additionally, all military personnel, regardless of rank or position, have the responsibility of reporting any incident or act thought to be a war crime to his commanding officer as soon as practicable after gaining such knowledge. Commanders receiving such reports must also make such facts known to the Staff Judge Advocate. It is quite clear that war crimes are not condoned and that every individual has the responsibility to refrain from, prevent and report such unwarranted conduct. While this individual responsibility is likewise placed upon the commander, he has the additional duty to insure that war crimes committed by his troops are promptly and adequately punished." http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mylai/Myl_law3.htm

At the National Press Club on February 17, 2006, General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that “It is the absolute responsibility of everybody in uniform to disobey an order that is either illegal or immoral.” General Pace said that the military is prohibited from committing crimes against humanity and that such orders and events must be made known.

However, when Manning followed the military code, his compliance with law was turned into a crime. Captain Fein goes on to tell the “court” [a real court would throw out the bogus charges, but Amerika no longer has real courts] that “ultimately, he aided the enemies of the United States by indirectly giving them intelligence through WikiLeaks.”

In other words, the “crime” is an unintended consequence of doing one’s duty--like the “collateral damage” of civilian casualties when drones, bombs, helicopter gunships, and trigger-happy troops kill women, children, aid workers, and village elders. Why is Washington only punishing Manning for the collateral damage attributed to him?

Captain Fein could not have put it any clearer. If you tell the truth and reveal Washington’s war crimes, you have aided the enemy. Captain Fein’s simple sentence has at one stroke abolished all whistleblower protections written into US statutory law and the First Amendment, and confined anyone with a moral conscience and sense of decency to indefinite detention and torture.

The illegal detention and treatment of Manning had a purpose, according to a number of informed people. Naomi Spencer, for example, writes that Manning’s long detention and delayed prosecution is designed to coerce Manning into implicating WikiLeaks in order that the US can extradite Julian Assange and either prosecute him as a terrorist or lock him away indefinitely in a military prison without any recourse to the courts, due process or the law. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30075.htm

Assange’s case is mysterious. Assange sought refuge in Sweden, where he was seduced by two women. Both admit that they had sexual intercourse with him voluntarily, but afterwards they have come forth with claims that as they were sleeping with him in the bed, he again had sexual intercourse with them, and that they had not approved this second helping and that he was asked to use a condom but did not.

The Swedish prosecutorial office, after investigating the charges, dismissed them. But, strangely, another Swedish prosecutor, a woman suspected of connections to Washington, resurrected the charges and is seeking to extradite Assange to Sweden from the UK for questioning.

The legal question is whether a prosecutor can seek extradition for investigative purposes. The UK Supreme Court thinks that this is a valid question, and has agreed to hear the case. Normally, extradition requests come from courts and are issued for persons formally charged with a crime. Sweden has not charged Assange with a crime.

The real question is whether the Swedish prosecutor is acting on behalf of Washington.

Many who follow the case believe that Washington is behind the prosecutor’s re-opening of the case, and if Sweden gets hold of Assange Sweden will send him to Washington to be put in indefinite detention and tortured until he says what Washington wants him to say--that he is an Al Qaeda operative.

This is the way that Washington intends to absolve itself of its war crimes revealed, allegedly, by Manning and Assange.

Meanwhile, Washington in a brazen display of hypocrisy accuses other countries of human rights abuses, while Congress has passed and President Obama has signed an indefinite detention and torture bill that US Representative Ron Paul says will accelerate America’s “slip into tyranny” and “descent into totalitarianism.”

In signing the Bill of Tyranny, President Obama indicated that he thought that the tyranny established by the bill did not go far enough. He announced that he was signing the bill with signing statements that reserved his right, regardless of any law, to send American citizens, deprived of due process and constitutional protection, abroad to be tortured.

This is the US government that claims to be a government of “freedom and democracy” and to be bringing “freedom and democracy” to others with bombs and invasions.

The past year gave us other ominous tyrannical developments. President Obama announced that he had a list of Americans whom he intended to assassinate without due process of law, and Homeland Security, itself an Orwellian name, announced that it had shifted its attention from terrorists to “domestic extremists.” The latter are undefined and consist of whomever Homeland Security so designates.

None of this was done behind closed doors. The murder of the US Constitution was a public crime witnessed by all. But like Kitty Genovese, who was stabbed to death in New York in 1964 in front of onlookers who failed to come to her aid, the media, Congress, bar associations, law schools, and the American public failed to come to the defense of the Constitution.

In my lifetime the collapse in respect for, and authority of, the Constitution has been an horrific event. Compare the ho-hum response to the Obama regime’s police state announcements with the public anger at President Richard Nixon over his enemies list. Try to imagine President Ronald Reagan announcing that he had a list of Americans marked for assassination without impeachment proceedings beginning forthwith.

Local and state police forces have been militarized not only in their equipment and armament but also in their attitude toward the public. Despite the absence of domestic terror attacks, Homeland Security conducts warrantless searches of cars and trucks on highways and of passengers using public transportation. A uniformed federal service is being trained to systematically violate the constitutional rights of citizens, and citizens are being trained to accept these violations as normal. The young have no memory of being able to board public transportation or use public roadways without intrusive searches or to gather in protest without being brutalized by the police. Liberty is being moved into the realm of myth and legend.

In such a system as is being constructed in public in front of our eyes, there is no freedom, no democracy, and no liberty. What stands before us is naked tyranny.

While America degenerates into a total police state, politicians constantly invoke “our values.” What are these values? Indefinite imprisonment without conviction in a court. Torture. Warrantless searches and home invasions. An epidemic of police brutality. Curtailment of free speech and peaceful assembly rights. Unprovoked aggression called “preemptive war.” Interference in the elections and internal affairs of other countries. Economic sanctions imposed on foreign populations whose leaders are not in Washington’s pocket.

If the American police state were merely an unintended consequence of a real war against terror, it could be dismantled when the war was over. However, the evidence is that the police state is an intended consequence. The PATRIOT Act is a voluminous and clever attack on the Constitution. It is not possible that it could have been written in the short time between 9/11 and its introduction in Congress. It was waiting on the shelf.

The dismantling of constitutionally protected civil liberties is purposeful, as is the accumulation of arbitrary and unaccountable powers in the executive branch of government. As there have been no terrorist events within the US in over a decade except for those known to have been organized by the FBI, there is no terrorist threat that justifies the establishment of a political regime of unaccountable power. It is being done on purpose under false pretenses, which means that there is an undeclared agenda. The threat that Americans face resides in Washington, D.C.

Of the presidential candidates, only Ron Paul addresses the Constitution’s demise.Yet, the electorate is concerned with matters unimportant by comparison. Propagandized 24/7 by the Ministry of Truth, Americans are not sufficiently aware of their plight to elect Ron Paul president.

It might be too late for even a President Ron Paul to turn things around. A president has no power unless his government supports him. What prospect would President Ron Paul have of getting his appointees confirmed by the Senate? The military/security complex is not going to vacate power. Powerful monied interests would block his appointments. If he persisted in being a problem for the Establishment, he would be victimized by a scandal and fail to be reelected if not forced to resign.

Remember what the Washington Establishment did to President Carter. His budget director and chief of staff were framed, thus depriving Carter of the powers of his office. Even Ronald Reagan had to give away more than half of his government, including the White House chief-of-staff and vice presidency, to the Establishment. President Reagan told me that he wanted to end stagflation in order that he could end the cold war, but that he could not sign a tax bill if I could not get one out of his administration that he could send to Congress.

I do not know, but I suspect that turning things around internally through the political system is not in the cards. Our chance to resurrect liberty might come from Washington’s hubris. Imperial ambitions and drive for power can produce unmanageable upheavals and a loss of allies. Overreach abroad with a demoralized, unemployed and downtrodden population at home are not the ingredients of success.

How much longer will the Russian government permit NGOs funded by the US Endowment for Democracy to interfere in its elections and to organize political protests? How much longer will China confuse its strategic interests with the American consumer market? How much longer will Japan, Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, and the Middle East oil states remain US puppets? How much longer can the dollar retain the reserve currency role when the Federal Reserve is monetizing vast quantities of debt?

How much longer can a “superpower” survive when it is incapable of producing political leadership?

America’s salvation will come when Washington suffers defeat of its hegemonic ambitions.

Many readers, especially those who watch Fox “News” and CNN and read the New York Times, might see hyperbole in my outlook for 2012. Surely, many believe, the draconian measures put in place will only be applied to terrorists. But how would we know? Indefinite detention and torture require no evidence to be presented. The American public has no way of knowing whether tortured detainees are terrorists or political opponents. The decision to detain and torture is an unaccountable decision. It relies on nothing but the subjective arbitrary decision of someone in the executive branch. Why are Americans prepared to take the word of a government that told them intentionally the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was a threat to America?

Like cancer, tyranny metastasizes. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet Union’s most famous writer, was a twice-decorated World War II Red Army commander. He made mild critical comments about Stalin’s conduct of the war in a private letter to a friend, and for this he was sentenced, not by a court, but in absentia by the NKVD, the secret police, to eight years in the Gulag Archipelago for “anti-Soviet propaganda.” Not even Stalin had indefinite detention. The closest the Soviets came to this medieval practice resurrected by the Bush and Obama regimes was internal exile in distant parts of the Soviet Union.

During much of the Soviet era, even art, literature and music were scrutinized for signs of “anit-Soviet propaganda.” America’s Dixie Chicks suffered a similar, but more frightening, fate. Bush did not need the NKVD. The American public did the job for the secret police. Wikipedia reports:

“During a London concert ten days before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, lead vocalist Maines said ‘we don't want this war, this violence, and we're ashamed that the President of the United States (George W. Bush) is from Texas.’ The statement offended many Americans, who thought it rude and unpatriotic, and the ensuing controversy cost the band half of their concert audience attendance in the United States. The incident negatively affected their career and led to accusations of the three women being "un-American", as well as hate mail, death threats, and the public destruction of their albums in protest.”

In Nazi Germany, the mildest criticism could bring a midnight knock at the door.

People with power use it. And power attracts the worst kind of persons. As Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prove, democracies are not immune to the evil use of power. Indeed, identical inhumane treatment of prisoners goes on inside the US prison system for ordinary criminals. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8451.htm A December 30, 2011, search on Yahoo for police brutality produced 20 million results. Over-fed goon cop thugs taser little children and people in wheel chairs. They body slam elderly grandmothers. The police are a horror. They represent a greater threat to citizens than do criminals.

Preventative war, indefinite imprisonment, rendition, torture of people alleged to be “suspects” (an undefined category), and assassination are all draconian punishments that require no evidence. Preventative war is an Orwellian concept. How do you prevent a war by initiating a war? How do we know that a country that did not attack us was going to attack us in the future? Preventative war is like Jeremy Bentham’s concept of preventing crime by locking up those thought by the upper crust to be predisposed to criminal activity before they commit a crime. Punishment without crime is now the American Way.

The concepts that the Bush/Obama regimes have institutionalized are totally foreign to the Anglo-American concepts of law and liberty. In one decade the US has been transformed from a free society into a police state. The American population, to the extent it is aware of what has occurred, has simply accepted the revolution from the top.

Ron Paul is the only American seeking the presidency who opposes the tyranny that has been institutionalized, and he is not leading in the polls.

This tells us all we need to know about the value Americans place on liberty. Americans seem to welcome the era of tyranny into which they are now entering.

---

About Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His Internet columns have attracted a worldwide following.