From mjkirk12 at yahoo.com  Mon Mar  2 16:23:15 2009
From: mjkirk12 at yahoo.com (Mike Kirk)
Date: Mon, 2 Mar 2009 13:23:15 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [CitizensTruth] Fw: Re: reminder of Monetary Seminar on Wednesday
	March 4th
Message-ID: <104810.74938.qm@web83815.mail.sp1.yahoo.com>

FYI:? Seminar downtown at Roosevelt University (Chicago)

6:30PM??? Free but RSVP is requested to email below.

-Mike

--- On Thu, 2/26/09, AMI <ami at taconic.net> wrote:
From: AMI <ami at taconic.net>
Subject: Re: reminder of Monetary Seminar on Wednesday March 4th
To: "AMI" <ami at taconic.net>
Date: Thursday, February 26, 2009, 9:33 PM





  
Its Wednesday March 4th!



AMI wrote:


  
  Dear Friends of the American Monetary Institute,

  

We are holding a free Monetary Seminar at Roosevelt University on
Wednesday evening, March 4th, 6:30 PM at the Spertus Room, 2nd floor.
You are invited to come, and please bring friends.

We Will discuss:

*How our ridiculous banking and monetary system has brought down the US
and World economies.

  

*Why bailouts won't establish confidence in banking.

  

*Common sense ways to protect your family

  

*How the system can be reformed for real using tried and true methods.

  

*Our part in putting pressure on our legislators to do the right thing.

Please let us know if you are attending so that light refreshments can
be arranged.

Sincerely,

Stephen Zarlenga

Director

  

  
   ?FREE? MONETARY ?SEMINAR

  
  Wednesday
March 4th

   
  
  
  How the
Banks 
  Broke our Money
System Again!  
  
  Learn
more about money in 3 hours 
  than
  most
economists learn? in
a
lifetime!

? The
Seminar will Discuss:
  * America's
Monetary Power has been usurped and privatized, leading to collapse!

  

  
  * How the money
power
became privatized, and is kept in? place by false theory.
  
  * A three
step program that restores it to society where it can promote the
general welfare.

  
  
  *
Why
inflation need not be a problem.

  

  ?This is
a hands
on do-able reality based program, not a theory, with many
 U.S. historical precedents, and more
going as
far back as Classical Greece and
 Rome .

  

  The Money system
acts like a fourth
branch of government,
generally affecting our daily lives more than the Executive, Judicial
and
Legislative branches combined. Yet it has been privatized and is
largely
outside the control of our democratic system of checks and balances
  where it has
unfairly
concentrated wealth
to obscene levels among other injustices.

  

  The American
Monetary
Institute is America?s
leading think tank focusing on monetary history, theory and reform.
Each
September we hold a 3 day monetary reform conference at Roosevelt
University,
where cutting edge experts speak on those subjects. Each quarter the
Institute offers this free introductory seminar. 
  This
seminar
is designed for Chicago area people who?d like a good background on how
our
money system works, why its not working well, how to fix it, and what
benefits
would follow in terms of infrastructure and health care and education;
and how
our society has the power to begin creating a superior future world,
instead of
getting mired in stupidity and warfare.

  
  
  Place: Roosevelt University, 430 S. Michigan in Chicago,

2nd floor, Spertus Room

  
  ?Date:? Wednesday, March 4th
?????????????
?? Time: 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM
  Late arrivals OK???
?? Dress: Informal; all are
welcome 
   ?

  Reservations
really appreciated so that light refreshments can be arranged 
   ?Call 224-805-2200? or email? ami at taconic.net

  
  

  RETURN TO AMI
HOME PAGE

  

  



 
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From mjkirk12 at yahoo.com  Mon Mar  2 19:09:56 2009
From: mjkirk12 at yahoo.com (Mike Kirk)
Date: Mon, 2 Mar 2009 16:09:56 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [CitizensTruth] Kathy Kelly to speak in Palatine, IL,
	Sunday March 8 2009
In-Reply-To: <1910794757.729551236025540151.JavaMail.root@sz0074a.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net>
Message-ID: <560381.21007.qm@web83814.mail.sp1.yahoo.com>


Kathy Kelly has agreed to speak at Countryside Church in Palatine, IL next Sunday afternoon (8 March 2009), from 1-3 PM CST.??? Directions at:? http://www.ccuu.org
Article at: http://vcnv.org/how-do-people-keep-going

Please call to confirm, as I am not positive this is finalized yet.


There will be a free will offering, as she does not charge for her engagements. 


Her main topic will be on her recent (January 2009) trip to Gaza .?

I know this is very short notice,? but please use whatever means you have at your disposal to advertise this.


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From hal at drxyzzy.org  Mon Mar  2 22:34:31 2009
From: hal at drxyzzy.org (Hal Snyder)
Date: Mon, 2 Mar 2009 21:34:31 -0600
Subject: [CitizensTruth] Kathy Kelly to speak in Palatine, IL,
	Sunday March 8 2009
In-Reply-To: <560381.21007.qm@web83814.mail.sp1.yahoo.com>
References: <560381.21007.qm@web83814.mail.sp1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <00C7DA86-D7FB-478F-8E54-06C51EC8C2CB@drxyzzy.org>

Time and date are confirmed for Kathy Kelly to speak in Palatine.  
They're just a little late updating the online calendar.

Sunday, March 8, 1-3 p.m.
Countryside Church, 1025 N. Smith St, Palatine, IL 60067

http://bit.ly/qtNSd <== map



On Mar 2, 2009, at 6:09 PM, Mike Kirk wrote:

> Kathy Kelly has agreed to speak at Countryside Church in Palatine,  
> IL next Sunday afternoon (8 March 2009), from 1-3 PM CST.     
> Directions at:  http://www.ccuu.org
>
>
>
> Article at: http://vcnv.org/how-do-people-keep-going
>
>
>
> Please call to confirm, as I am not positive this is finalized yet.
>
> There will be a free will offering, as she does not charge for her  
> engagements.
>
>
>
> Her main topic will be on her recent (January 2009) trip to Gaza .
>
> I know this is very short notice,  but please use whatever means you  
> have at your disposal to advertise this.
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From futurenotwritten at yahoo.com  Tue Mar  3 09:47:00 2009
From: futurenotwritten at yahoo.com (Jay Becker)
Date: Tue, 3 Mar 2009 06:47:00 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [CitizensTruth] Greenwald video: Rethink Afghanistan
Message-ID: <966769.98903.qm@web33507.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

Watch this: http://www.truthout.org/video/030209T

Then join us on March 14th, details here: www.chicagoworldcantwait.org

Jay

    Stop thinking like an American, 
Start thinking about humanity!



      
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From mincam2 at yahoo.com  Wed Mar  4 21:59:25 2009
From: mincam2 at yahoo.com (Chuck Minne)
Date: Wed, 4 Mar 2009 18:59:25 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [CitizensTruth] ...blowing up their new Range Rovers for the
	insurance
In-Reply-To: <966769.98903.qm@web33507.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <90318.78343.qm@web36907.mail.mud.yahoo.com>


 





Frozen Assets


Demonstrators in front of Iceland?s parliament building, in Reykjav?k?s Austurvollur Square, on January 31. Photographs by Jonas Fredwall Karlsson. 

Wall Street on the Tundra 
Iceland?s de facto bankruptcy?its currency (the krona) is kaput, its debt is 850 percent of G.D.P., its people are hoarding food and cash and blowing up their new Range Rovers for the insurance?resulted from a stunning collective madness. What led a tiny fishing nation, population 300,000, to decide, around 2003, to re-invent itself as a global financial power? In Reykjav?k, where men are men, and the women seem to have completely given up on them, the author follows the peculiarly Icelandic logic behind the meltdown. 
by Michael Lewis April 2009 


Just after October 6, 2008, when Iceland effectively went bust, I spoke to a man at the International Monetary Fund who had been flown in to Reykjav?k to determine if money might responsibly be lent to such a spectacularly bankrupt nation. He?d never been to Iceland, knew nothing about the place, and said he needed a map to find it. He has spent his life dealing with famously distressed countries, usually in Africa, perpetually in one kind of financial trouble or another. Iceland was entirely new to his experience: a nation of extremely well-to-do (No. 1 in the United Nations? 2008 Human Development Index), well-educated, historically rational human beings who had organized themselves to commit one of the single greatest acts of madness in financial history. ?You have to understand,? he told me, ?Iceland is no longer a country. It is a hedge fund.? 
  
How did the economy get into this mess? Visit our archive ?Charting the Road to Ruin.? Plus: A Q&A with Michael Lewis. Illustration by Brad Holland.
?
An entire nation without immediate experience or even distant memory of high finance had gazed upon the example of Wall Street and said, ?We can do that.? For a brief moment it appeared that they could. In 2003, Iceland?s three biggest banks had assets of only a few billion dollars, about 100 percent of its gross domestic product. Over the next three and a half years they grew to over $140 billion and were so much greater than Iceland?s G.D.P. that it made no sense to calculate the percentage of it they accounted for. It was, as one economist put it to me, ?the most rapid expansion of a banking system in the history of mankind.? 
?
At the same time, in part because the banks were also lending Icelanders money to buy stocks and real estate, the value of Icelandic stocks and real estate went through the roof. From 2003 to 2007, while the U.S. stock market was doubling, the Icelandic stock market multiplied by nine times. Reykjav?k real-estate prices tripled. By 2006 the average Icelandic family was three times as wealthy as it had been in 2003, and virtually all of this new wealth was one way or another tied to the new investment-banking industry. ?Everyone was learning Black-Scholes? (the option-pricing model), says Ragnar Arnason, a professor of fishing economics at the University of Iceland, who watched students flee the economics of fishing for the economics of money. ?The schools of engineering and math were offering courses on financial engineering. We had hundreds and hundreds of people studying finance.? This in a country the size of Kentucky, but with fewer citizens
 than greater Peoria, Illinois. Peoria, Illinois, doesn?t have global financial institutions, or a university devoting itself to training many hundreds of financiers, or its own currency. And yet the world was taking Iceland seriously. (March 2006 Bloomberg News headline: iceland?s billionaire tycoon ?thor? braves u.s. with hedge fund.) 
?
Global financial ambition turned out to have a downside. When their three brand-new global-size banks collapsed, last October, Iceland?s 300,000 citizens found that they bore some kind of responsibility for $100 billion of banking losses?which works out to roughly $330,000 for every Icelandic man, woman, and child. On top of that they had tens of billions of dollars in personal losses from their own bizarre private foreign-currency speculations, and even more from the 85 percent collapse in the Icelandic stock market. The exact dollar amount of Iceland?s financial hole was essentially unknowable, as it depended on the value of the generally stable Icelandic krona, which had also crashed and was removed from the market by the Icelandic government. But it was a lot. 
?
Iceland instantly became the only nation on earth that Americans could point to and say, ?Well, at least we didn?t do that.? In the end, Icelanders amassed debts amounting to 850 percent of their G.D.P. (The debt-drowned United States has reached just 350 percent.) As absurdly big and important as Wall Street became in the U.S. economy, it never grew so large that the rest of the population could not, in a pinch, bail it out. Any one of the three Icelandic banks suffered losses too large for the nation to bear; taken together they were so ridiculously out of proportion that, within weeks of the collapse, a third of the population told pollsters that they were considering emigration. 
?
In just three or four years an entirely new way of economic life had been grafted onto the side of this stable, collectivist society, and the graft had overwhelmed the host. ?It was just a group of young kids,? said the man from the I.M.F. ?In this egalitarian society, they came in, dressed in black, and started doing business.?


?Continued at: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/04/iceland200904?printable=true&currentPage=all

?
?
The highest lotto odds are for the US Power Ball Lotto and are roughly 80,000,000 to 1.
?
Just as an example, suppose that the odds of life elsewhere in the universe are a million times higher, or 80,000,000,000,000 to 1.
?
In that part of the universe that has been measured out to 14 billion light years, there are 30 billion trillion stars (suns), or 30,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars.
?
Assuming odds a million times worse than the Power Ball Lotto, there are 375 billion (375,000,000,000) stars supporting life. Think we?re alone?


      
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From geri at thetwofacesofmoney.com  Fri Mar  6 17:25:57 2009
From: geri at thetwofacesofmoney.com (Geri Perry)
Date: Fri, 06 Mar 2009 16:25:57 -0600
Subject: [CitizensTruth] bird flu virus "inadvertently" contaminated
	vaccines?
Message-ID: <49B1A2F5.9070006@thetwofacesofmoney.com>

check this out about bird flu virus "inadvertently" contaminating 
vaccine samples sent to 3 countries:

 http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2009/02/questions_about_bird_flu_conta.php 
and read through comments, especially the one by Jody Lanard, M.D. 

Note that she says that it was probably a WHO collaborating lab that 
supplied Baxter with H5N1 (bird flu virus strain). And, quote: "The 
notion that Baxter is not reporting out all the details due to 
propietary production secrecy needs is beyond outrageous.Sending H5N1 
contaminated virus samples to three countries should qualify as a public 
health incident of global concern, and the International Health 
Regulations should kick in. Delaying public reporting of this potential 
catastrophe for weeks is unforgivable and reprehensible. <END Quote>



From mincam2 at yahoo.com  Fri Mar  6 18:14:04 2009
From: mincam2 at yahoo.com (Chuck Minne)
Date: Fri, 6 Mar 2009 15:14:04 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [CitizensTruth] Mother of All Conspiracy Videos
In-Reply-To: <90318.78343.qm@web36907.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <763999.28342.qm@web36904.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

This is the Mother Of All Conspiracy Videos, 29 units long. The first three or four are about 911 and while interesting not a whole lot new there to non-novice 911 disbelievers. But after that it really gets fun, and maybe even believable. Talks about the Rothschilds and the three city states of Washington DC, London and the Vatican. Gets into Freemasonry, Knights of the Templar, Illuminati, Trilaterals, and more. Goes back to BC times and makes the case that Jesus was the son of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar. And that is only around unit 11, about where I am now.
?
Incredible stuff, not sure how much is accurate, but it sure is entertaining and interesting - almost addicting.
?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0o6mccnnfU


?
?
The highest lotto odds are for the US Power Ball Lotto and are roughly 80,000,000 to 1.
?
Just as an example, suppose that the odds of life elsewhere in the universe are a million times higher, or 80,000,000,000,000 to 1.
?
In that part of the universe that has been measured out to 14 billion light years, there are 30 billion trillion stars (suns), or 30,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars.
?
Assuming odds a million times worse than the Power Ball Lotto, there are 375 billion (375,000,000,000) stars supporting life. Think we?re alone?


?


      
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From rmigalla at earthlink.net  Sat Mar  7 12:52:51 2009
From: rmigalla at earthlink.net (Robin Migalla)
Date: Sat, 7 Mar 2009 11:52:51 -0600
Subject: [CitizensTruth] News program?
Message-ID: <01C99F1B.3F0A1AD0.rmigalla@earthlink.net>

Hi Everyone,

Does anyone else on this list watch this news program:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uPpndvofK8&feature=sdig&et=1235829209.0

What do you think of it?

Thanks,
Robin



From rmigalla at earthlink.net  Sat Mar  7 13:01:13 2009
From: rmigalla at earthlink.net (Robin Migalla)
Date: Sat, 7 Mar 2009 12:01:13 -0600
Subject: [CitizensTruth] Please join me on March 14th
Message-ID: <01C99F1C.6A3552F0.rmigalla@earthlink.net>

Hello Folks,

Please join me us March 14h.

Did you know that there is a DIRECT relationship between how well nourished 
one is and how healthy one will be in body, mind and spirit?  Weston A. 
Price, D.D.S. discovered and documented this in "Nutrition and Physical 
Degeneration."  He clearly documents the relationship between diet and:

Physical Disease
Dental Disease
Mental illness
Crime (which is really just societal disease)
War (which is really mental illness on a mass scale)

Our meeting on Saturday, March 14th at 9:30am, "Nourishing our Children" is 
going to be the best meeting of the year for people to learn the basics of 
what this means.  Please come join us to learn more about the real MAGIC 
BULLET.  Besides, you'll never find a better bunch of folks, it's FREE, and 
the "eats" are amazing!

Never underestimate the power of a simple solution.  Eating well just might 
actually turn out to be "Universal Health Care" (and perhaps even the 
solution to our economic and political problems, too).

Here's a link to learn more...

http://westonaprice-elgin.org/Updates/updatesindex.html

Please share this flyer with others:

http://westonaprice-elgin.org/Updates/20090314.pdf

Cheers,
Robin
www.healthforlifecoloncare.com


From rmigalla at earthlink.net  Sat Mar  7 17:21:25 2009
From: rmigalla at earthlink.net (Robin Migalla)
Date: Sat, 7 Mar 2009 16:21:25 -0600
Subject: [CitizensTruth] FW: March 10th Community Conversations Program-CMAP
	2040-
Message-ID: <01C99F40.C3F115D0.rmigalla@earthlink.net>

Hi Folks,

If you're in or near the Fox River Watershed, or if you just care about the 
environment in Illinois, someone is actually asking for our input.  I plan 
on attending this on Tuesday.  Anyone want to join me?

Cheers,
Robin

-----Original Message-----
From:	slowglobalwarming at gmail.com [SMTP:slowglobalwarming at gmail.com]
Sent:	Saturday, March 07, 2009 15:53
To:	slowglobalwarming at gmail.com
Subject:	Fwd: March 10th Community Conversations Program-CMAP 2040-

*
*


*Can you please share with friends.*

------------------------------

**

*COMMUNITY  CONVERSATIONS*



To help keep communities like those throughout the Fox River watershed
prosperous, the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) is
developing a regional comprehensive plan called *GO TO 2040*
. This plan will develop and apply strategies for addressing growth and its
serious implications on quality of life issues including transportation,
housing, economic development, open space, the environment, and natural
resources. *We want to hear your environmental perspectives *in each of
these issue areas regarding how the region should plan for 2040. *GO TO 
2040
*regional plan will be built on a common vision of how residents want
northeastern Illinois to look for themselves, their children, and their
grandchildren.

You are invited to participate in a *GO TO 2040 *Community Conversation
hosted by the *Fox River Ecosystem Partnership (FREP), the Elgin Community
Network Elgin Alive series, and the Gail Borden Library *

**

*Please join us on *

*Tuesday, March 10, 2009 *

*6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. *

*Gail Borden Library   **270 N. Grove Ave. **Elgin, IL 60120 *

**
*

Please register
*in person at the Gail Borden Library Adult Services Information Desk, by
phoning 847-429-4680, or by visiting the library's web calendar (
www.gailborden.info).

For more information about the
*GO TO 2040 *Community Conversations or CMAP, please contact Hubert Morgan

at hmorgan at cmap.illinois.gov or 312-386-8707.



**



**
*
*

From futurenotwritten at yahoo.com  Tue Mar 10 09:20:05 2009
From: futurenotwritten at yahoo.com (Jay Becker)
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 06:20:05 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [CitizensTruth] Ward Churchill lawsuit begins in Denver
Message-ID: <659792.63816.qm@web33505.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

Much is at stake in the Churchill case and students continue to build support for him. They were joined by Bill Ayers and Derrick Jensen at an event last week. Below, an article from Revolution newspaper (http://revcom.us/a/158/WChurchill-en.html)
Jay

Ward Churchill Lawsuit Against University of Colorado Begins March 9th

        

 The jury trial for Ward Churchill?s lawsuit against the University
of Colorado (CU) is scheduled to begin in Denver District Court on
March 9th. Churchill was a tenured professor and chairman of the ethnic
studies department at CU-Boulder when he was fired by the CU Board of
Regents in July, 2007, supposedly for research misconduct. The lawsuit
charges that Churchill was in fact fired in retaliation for writing a
controversial essay about the 9/11 attacks. 

	As readers of Revolution are aware, this case began in early
2005 when Ward Churchill was the target of a highly orchestrated,
nationwide political witch-hunt by two powerful Republican governors
and other politicians and right-wing forces after an essay he?d written
shortly after 9/11 came to light. In that piece Churchill described the
attack on the World Trade Center as an example of ?chickens coming home
to roost,? and compared the business operatives working in the WTC
serving ?America?s global financial empire? to ?little Eichmanns.? 1  

 Right away Bill Owens, Republican governor of Colorado at the time,
called for the University to fire Churchill because of these remarks.
And the university conducted an investigation to see if Churchill
should be fired?or jailed?for what he?d written. Concluding that his
writings were protected speech, the university switched tactics and
announced that Churchill would be investigated for academic misconduct
instead. 



 The administration pulled together a collection of old charges and
disputes made over the years about minor elements of Churchill?s large
body of work, and claimed they amounted to serious academic misconduct.
Despite the fact that it was clear the only reason Churchill was being
investigated was because of his political statements, a faculty
committee agreed to do the dirty work of carrying out an academic
inquisition. Their findings of ?research misconduct,? which have been
called a sham by those who have taken the time to study them, were used
by the University President and Board of Regents as a pretext for a
blatantly political firing. [For more on the history of this case, see Revolution Issue #92, and Issue #98].  

 Natsu Saito, Professor of Law and wife of Churchill, wrote in a
November, 2008 update: ?This is a classic ?pretext? case in which CU
has come up with claims of ?research misconduct? to fire Ward for
speech protected by the First Amendment.? Simply put:
CU never would have investigated but for Ward's "controversial" speech;CU didn't have any actual complaints, so they solicited and invented them;the evidence didn't support CU's findings; andeven if the allegations were true, they aren't things tenured professors ever get fired for... except in politically motivated cases.?
 In preparation for the trial, Churchill?s attorney David Lane
questioned ex-governor Owens in a deposition released February 5th. In
it Owens admits that he told the University to fire Churchill because
of the content of the essay. And he also admits that if they HAD fired
him for that reason it would have violated Churchill?s free-speech
rights. But according to Owens, the university ?didn?t follow my advice
and, in fact, chose to ignore it.? Therefore, Owens claims, even though
the University went ahead and fired him, using the pretext of academic
misconduct, there?s no basis to say as Churchill does that he was fired
because of ?pressure from the top.? 2  

Students Build Support on Campus

 Student organizations on the Boulder campus have been organizing
support and raising funds for Churchill?s upcoming lawsuit. And they
are calling for students and other supporters to come to the opening
day of the trial. On March 3rd members of Students for True Academic
Freedom (STAF) erected a 3-foot-by-3-foot cage labeled ?Free Speech,?
and took turns making their case for Professor Churchill from inside
the cage. 



 STAF and two other student groups?Student Environmental Action
Coalition and 180 Degree Shift at the 11th Hour?have also organized an
event for March 5th , ?Forbidden Education and the Rise of
Neo-McCarthyism.? The event will feature William Ayers, Distinguished
Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University
of Illinois at Chicago; and activist and author Derrick Jensen. Ayers
was the repeated target of right wing forces, including vice
presidential candidate Sarah Palin, during the recent election
campaign. Churchill will join them for a question-and-answer session. 


 Aaron Smith, member of STAF and recent CU graduate, told the Rocky
Mountain News ?What we?re trying to show with this event is that Ward
Churchill is not alone in this? These speakers are going to put
(Churchill?s) case into the political context of an attack on academic
freedom on a national scale.? 3 
In an act that shows the University is not yet finished trying to
intimidate those who defy them, they have told the students they are
being charged $3,000 for the cost of providing ?security? for their
program. 

Centerpiece of a Much Broader Assault

 The attack on Churchill has been the centerpiece of a much broader
assault on critical thinking and dissent in academia by right wing
media mouth-pieces, and by self-appointed academic censors, out to
intimidate and silence especially scholars whose research questions and
challenges official myths about this country?s history, and its role in
the world. Churchill?s scholarship has done both?bringing to light the
genocide of the Native people by the European settlers; and exposing
the repression against domestic political opponents during the height
of the 60s. 

 In the update referred to above, Professor Saito wrote: ?Why fight
this particular injustice? We're doing it because Ward has become a
symbol of what academic freedom and the right to political dissent mean
in this country, in these times? every week we hear of professors being
fired, or intimidated into changing what they teach.? And students who
believe everything they hear on the TV ?news.?? For real change to
happen, the next generation will have to know how to think critically.?
That won't happen?regardless of who's in the White House?unless we
defend the First Amendment in practice, not just in theory. The
chilling effect of CU's actions are very real.? If rightwing forces
don't encounter resistance to this firing, they will consider it
license to constrict freedom of expression even more.?

 From the very beginning Churchill has refused to back down in the
face of open intimidation and vicious and ugly threats, and attempts to
destroy his academic career and his reputation. His courageous and
determined stand has inspired many others?faculty and scholars and
students?to do the same. Many more people?faculty and students and from
all arenas of society?need to condemn this whole railroad and join the
battle to support Churchill, and the universities as places where
critical thinking and dissent are valued and encouraged. 
?

Notes

1 Adolf Eichmann was a Nazi, put in
charge of the trains that carried Jews to the death camps in Poland
during WW II. After the war he was captured in Argentina, brought to
Israel for trial, and executed. [back]

2 ?Ward Churchill, Bill Owens tangle again,? Lynn Bartels, Rocky Mountain News, 2/6/09 [back]

3 ?Bill Ayers coming to CU to defend Ward Churchill,? Lance Vaillancourt, Rocky Mountain News, 2/20/09 [back]


      
      Send us your comments.

    Stop thinking like an American, 
Start thinking about humanity!



      
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From rmigalla at earthlink.net  Tue Mar 10 13:30:52 2009
From: rmigalla at earthlink.net (Robin Migalla)
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 11:30:52 -0600
Subject: [CitizensTruth] A pretty good assessment I think
Message-ID: <01C9A173.AC66D0A0.rmigalla@earthlink.net>

Hi All,

I liked the way this puts our foreign policy into a new perspective:

http://www.house.gov/htbin/blog_inc?BLOG,tx14_paul,blog,999,All,Item%20not%20found,ID=090309_2735,TEMPLATE=postingdetail.shtml

Cheers,
Robin

From edward_rynearson at yahoo.com  Wed Mar 11 12:52:36 2009
From: edward_rynearson at yahoo.com (Edward Rynearson)
Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 09:52:36 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [CitizensTruth] Kevin Barrett Article
In-Reply-To: <mailman.13.1236787215.44550.citizenstruth@six.pairlist.net>
Message-ID: <293948.38503.qm@web30008.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

http://edwardrynearson.wordpress.com/2009/03/10/tarpleys-warning-the-bad-news-about-obama/
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From geri at thetwofacesofmoney.com  Wed Mar 11 17:59:39 2009
From: geri at thetwofacesofmoney.com (Geri Perry)
Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:59:39 -0500
Subject: [CitizensTruth] Dennis Kucinich describes One Simple Reform that
 will fix the leading cause of world's ills
Message-ID: <49B8344B.60205@thetwofacesofmoney.com>

LESS than 1 1/2 minutes of your time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r_-QRKyu6g

Call/contact your Congress critter today and as often as you can and 
demand that Congress support Dennis Kucinich and do its Constitutional 
duty to coin (create) money and regulate the value thereof.

If you still believe our money and currency should be backed by precious 
metals or that it is the government (and not the banking elite) that is 
the root of the problem - please CAREFULLY watch these three you tube 
segments, less than 25 minutes total time to watch all 3 segments, 
beginning with this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E0UPBtmTb0

Following are some of my additions/reiterations to Dale's presentation 
to help dispel common myths:

1. The common myth is that debt free Constitutional money leads to 
mischief - when in fact it is debt-based money that has ALWAYS led to 
mischief and much worse. This is true whether metals or paper are used 
as  money. When money is created as debt, be it paper, or metal, it is 
treated as a commodity which allows those in control to obtain monopoly 
power over it, and government is turned into the servant of the money 
power/monopoly (as Jefferson foretold). This is why one of the 
Rothschild's said "I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of 
England to rule the Empire, the man that controls Britain's money supply 
controls the British Empire.And I control the money supply." This has 
been going on for 1000s of years!

2. Today, we have to keep reminding ourselves that although currency is 
printed at the Bureau of Engraving, this is only a TINY fraction of the 
money supply - and it is ONLY printed AFTER the government has in effect 
borrowed more "money" from the privately owned banking system. In short 
- our government does NOT create our money - the private banking system 
does, and the banking system is the prime beneficiary - NOT the 
government! (Hence a Rothschild scenario is in operation).

3. The money creation system I describe in my book and in the slide 
presentation on my website (which is closely aligned with the American 
Monetary Institute, with one important element added, as described in 
the intro page to my slide presentation) minimizes, if not eliminates 
that kind of "you scratch my back" scenario through transparency, 
extinguishment and in response to the demand coming directly from the 
people's own productive and consumptive capacity.

4. As Byron Dale said - money is a TOOL, nothing more - nothing less. I 
urge you to read carefully my page on What is Money (as well as Quotes 
on Gold and notable quotes pages): 
http://www.thetwofacesofmoney.com/index.php/Site/WhatIsMoney

5. As to metals having an advantage because they are limited this is the 
EXACT reason why they should NOT be used as money (something argued hard 
and often by Franklin, Jefferson, Lincoln and others). Recall that 
fractional reserve (creating money as debt) was invented at a time when 
metals were used as money.

6. We labor under the media-created myth that the government prints 
money, when in fact money is created (mostly as computer digits) when 
debt is issued.

Consider that today the total outstanding debt (public and private) is 
FAR greater than our money supply. Thus our total debt is $53 trillion 
(give or take a trillion or two) and climbing rapidly, while our money 
supply, using the broadest and now unpublished measure of M3, is around 
$14 trillion (give or take a trillion). If you use Fed measures of M1 + 
M2, the money supply is just $7.7 trillion (as of spring of last year).

HOW can there be too much money in the system??? There is TOO MUCH DEBT 
--- NOT too much money!

As the ending segment of The Money Masters details, this fact has 
justified the plunder of other people's resources all through the ages, 
and is the reason countries around the world are now disintegrating.

It's well past time we stopped this travesty. PLEASE join this crusade, 
and contact your Congress critters now and often on this subject.



From aqmstaffo at mailbag.com  Thu Mar 12 02:10:32 2009
From: aqmstaffo at mailbag.com (Daniel Stafford)
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 01:10:32 -0500
Subject: [CitizensTruth] Put Single-Payer on the Table
Message-ID: <49B8A758.4050302@mailbag.com>

http://www.truthout.org/031109HA



<http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php>


      Put Single-Payer on the Table <http://www.truthout.org/031109HA>

Tuesday 10 March 2009

by: Amy Goodman  |  Visit article original @ *Truthdig* 
<http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090310_put_single_payer_on_the_table/>

photo
In front of Blue Cross headquarters, as part of a larger demonstration, 
a protester advocates for single-payer universal health care. (Photo: 
ChiSPAN)

    President Barack Obama promises health-care reform, but he has taken 
single-payer health care off the table. Single-payer is the system that 
removes private insurance companies from the picture; the government 
pays all the bills, but health-care delivery remains private. People 
still get their choice of what doctor to go to and what hospital to use. 
Single-payer reduces the administrative costs and removes the profit 
that insurance companies add to health-care delivery. Single-payer 
solutions, however, get almost no space in the debate.

    A study just released by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a media 
watchdog group, found that in the week before Obama's health-care 
summit, of the hundreds of stories that appeared in major newspapers and 
on the networks, "only five included the views of advocates of 
single-payer - none of which appeared on television." Most opinion 
columns that mentioned single-payer were written by opponents.

    Congress is considering H.R. 676, "Expanded and Improved Medicare 
for All," sponsored by John Conyers, D-Mich., with 64 co-sponsors. Yet 
even when Rep. Conyers directly asked Obama at a Congressional Black 
Caucus meeting if he could attend the White House health-care summit, he 
was not immediately invited. Nor was any other advocate for single-payer 
health care.

    Conyers had asked to bring Dr. Marcia Angell, the first woman editor 
in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, the most prestigious 
medical journal in the country, and Dr. Quentin Young. Young is perhaps 
the most well-known single-payer advocate in America. He was Martin 
Luther King Jr.'s doctor when King lived in Chicago. "My 15-minute house 
calls would stretch into three hours," he told me.

    But he came to know Barack Obama even better. Though his medical 
partner was Obama's doctor, Young was his neighbor, friend and ally for 
decades. "Obama supported single-payer, gave speeches for it," he said.

    This past weekend, hundreds turned out to honor the 85-year-old 
Young, including the Illinois governor and three members of Congress, 
but the White House's response to Conyers' request that Young be 
included in the summit? A resounding no. Perhaps because Obama 
personally knows how persuasive and committed Young is.

    After much outcry, Conyers was invited. Activist groups like 
Physicians for a National Health Program (pnhp.org) expressed outrage 
that no other single-payer advocate was to be among the 120 people at 
the summit. Finally, the White House relented and invited Dr. Oliver 
Fein, president of PNHP. Two people out of 120.

    Locked out of the debate, silenced by the media, single-payer 
advocates are taking action. Russell Mokhiber, who writes and edits the 
Corporate Crime Reporter, has decided that the time has come to directly 
confront the problem of our broken health-care system. He's going to the 
national meeting of the American Health Insurance Plans and is joining 
others in burning their health-insurance bills outside in protest. 
Mokhiber told me, "The insurance companies have no place in the health 
care of American people. How are we going to beat these people? We have 
to start the direct confrontation." Launching a new organization, 
*Single Payer Action* (singlepayeraction.org 
<http://www.singlepayeraction.org>), Mokhiber and others promise to take 
the issue to the insurance industry executives, the lobbyists and the 
members of Congress directly, in Washington, D.C., and their home 
district offices.

    Critical mass is building behind a single-payer system. From Nobel 
Laureate in Economics Joseph Stiglitz, who told me, "I've reluctantly 
come to the view that it's the only alternative," to health-care 
providers themselves, who witness and endure the system's failure 
firsthand. Geri Jenkins of the newly formed, 150,000-nurses-strong 
United American Nurses-National Nurses Organizing Committee (nnoc.net) 
said: "It is the only health-care-reform proposal that can work. ... We 
are currently pushing to have a genuine, honest policy debate, because 
we'll win ... the health insurers will collapse under the weight of 
their own irrelevance."

    Dr. Young has now been invited to a Senate meeting along with the 
"usual suspects": health-insurance providers, Big Pharma and 
health-care-reform advocates. I asked Young what he thought of the 
refrain coming from the White House, as well as from the leading senator 
on the issue, Max Baucus, that "single-payer is off the table." "It's 
repulsive," sighed Young. "We are very angry." But not discouraged. I 
asked him what he thought about Burn Your Health Insurance Bill Day. 
"Things are heating up." he chuckled. "When things are happening that 
you have nothing to do with, you know it's a movement."

    --------

    /Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column./

    /Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international 
TV/radio news hour airing on more than 700 stations in North America. 
She was awarded the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the "Alternative 
Nobel" prize, and received the award in the Swedish Parliament in 
December./



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From Walterb306 at cs.com  Thu Mar 12 12:32:52 2009
From: Walterb306 at cs.com (Walterb306 at cs.com)
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 12:32:52 EDT
Subject: [CitizensTruth] ARTICLE - Vital need for non corporate independent
	media
Message-ID: <d0d.4ca40275.36ea9334@cs.com>

All,

FYI,

Beverley



A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT

http://buzzflash.com/articles/node/7929

In a testament to the vital need for non corporate, independent?media, the 
non-profit MinnPost.com ?posted a Five Alarm bombshell: Seymour Hersh stated 
that a top secret assassination squad reported directly to Dick Cheney in the 
Bush Administration.
Ignored by the corporate mainstream press -- as usual -- Hersh's comments 
were picked up and followed up upon by the MinnPost following a forum at the 
University of Minnesota.? 
Hersh almost in passing revealed: 
"Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read 
it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command 
-- JSOC it?s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community 
that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the 
Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not 
report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the 
secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...
"Congress has no oversight of it. It?s an executive assassination ring 
essentially, and it?s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was 
a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, 
ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.
"Under President Bush?s authority, they?ve been going into countries, not 
talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list 
and executing them and leaving. That?s been going on, in the name of all of 
us.
Moreover, Hersh dropped a second Five Alarm bombshell: the CIA was more 
deeply involved in spying on American citizens than ever previously revealed: 
"After 9/11, I haven?t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency 
was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to 
be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven?t 
been called on it yet."
Like BuzzFlash, the MinnPost has shown the importance of a completely 
independent media, free of corporate influence, to expose the crimes and shocking 
actions?of those in power.
Coming from anybody else, these allegations would be met with some 
skepticism.? But Eric Black of the online MinnPost knew that Hersh, a long-time 
intelligence correspondent for the New Yorker, has impeccable credentials and bats 
nearly 100% with his analysis and conclusions.? So he not only found the dynamite 
buried in a question and answer session,?Black followed up by e-mail with 
Hersh to verify the quotes.
Let?BuzzFlash know if a former vice-president ordering and overseeing the 
assassinations of people in foreign countries makes the front page news of any 
mainstream corporate newspaper, the nightly news, or corporate radio.? Somehow 
we doubt it will get much play, if any.
That's why we need the independent media, such as MinnPost and BuzzFlash. 
Hersh spoke indirectly to the need for alternative sources of information 
when he observed:
"The major newspapers joined the [Bush] team," Hersh said. Top editors passed 
the message to investigative reporters not to "pick holes" in what Bush was 
doing. Violations of the Bill of Rights happened in the plain sight of the 
public. It it was not only tolerated, but Bush was re-elected.
But the only completely independent alternative to the corporate press is a 
grassroots-supported media, which is accountable to the citizens of America and 
its communities.
MinnPost.com proved that once again.
Now, we still have a question at BuzzFlash. 
When will Dick Cheney be tried and put away for war crimes and violations of 
American law?
Assassination Hersh
to post comments | 
No Suprise
Submitted by Captain Jessie on Thu, 03/12/2009 - 10:34am. This does not 
surprise me in the slightest. There is nothing sacred with Cheney and my suspicions 
tell me that American citizens have been rubbed out by this squad under the 
direction of Cheney, the evil one. Now that the lid has been taken off the worm 
can, we can just imagine how far the monster went. Could this explain why the 
Democrats in congress were so timid? Conspiratorial, yes. Impossible, no. ? 
login or register to post comments 
Hit them instead...
Submitted by GOPHater on Thu, 03/12/2009 - 8:43am. Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld 
should be in prison awaiting execution for war crimes, treason, torture, 
violations of international law, and violations of the U. S. Constitution. Oh, and 
by the way, if we need anyone to "pull the switch" I volunteer. ? login or 
register to post comments 
In other words, business as usual?
Submitted by smchris on Thu, 03/12/2009 - 8:29am. Big brother of a college 
pal was one of the people whose FOI requests uncovered CIA domestic 
investigations of citizens. During the Vietnam war. ? login or register to post comments 
Nothing New.
Submitted by bladerunner on Thu, 03/12/2009 - 9:51am. Yeah this is nothing 
new. But if it gets this group closer to jail, something good will have come out 
of it. Why this is shocking to people is the true story, how blind and stupid 
the population really is. ? login or register to post comments 
This Is Outrageous
Submitted by elder693 on Thu, 03/12/2009 - 8:17am. 
However, it was not totally ignored by the ACNM. Olbermann did a bit on this 
last night and promised more in-depth reporting tonight.
Can A.G. Holder and the Obama administration afford to ignore this without 
becoming co-conspirators after the fact and guilty of obstruction of justice?
Allowing this kind of lawlessness by people at the very top of our government 
makes a joke of the law itself. People have already begun deeply distrusting 
our institutions. Next thing we know, we will all start writing our own 
signing statements stating why we think certain laws are stupid and why we will not 
obey them any longer. 
If one person is above the law, there really is no law; just an empty image 
of a lawful nation.
While nothing Dick Cheney did or does surprises me anymore, I am still 
capable of great outrage and this piece of information sends me over the top. My 
hands are actually shaking as I type this. The adrenalin is flowing like Niagara 
Falls.
If everyone who reads Buzzflash will take the time to contact A.G. Holder by 
phone, fax or email today, it might have some effect. While I, and I imagine a 
number of others, hoped for bipartisanship, it has become obvious that the 
goopers have no interest in working with President Obama because they say they 
don't like his policies. 
The electorate doesn't like their policies, which landed us all in the 
current nightmare. That same electorate had better not find out that deals have been 
made and that accountability is impossible. If there is no accountability 
now, it is time for serious civil disobedience.
The whole world is watching.
? login or register to post comments 
YOU ARE RIGHT WE MUST MOVE OUR VOICES TO BE HEARD 
Submitted by DWIGHTBAKER on Thu, 03/12/2009 - 8:29am. I agree with everything 
you said, and I have been pushing OBAMA along with serval e-mails a day to 
increase the size of the Justice Department five fold. What could ever be more 
important for us than to clean out the felons, despots and tyrants before 
moving forward. That is the purpose for CRIMINAL JUSTICE. And I have hands on 
experience how a good DA works the Grand Jury and he most times has just good 
suspicons but gets his way. So down here in Texas many say THERE YOU GO. WHAT ARE 
YOU WAITING ON? ? login or register to post comments 
HOW TO FIX OUR GOVERNMENT 
Submitted by DWIGHTBAKER on Thu, 03/12/2009 - 5:11am. WHY DO WE NEED ANOTHER 
OF WHAT WE ALREADY HAVE??????? DO SOME THINK ON CAPITOL HILL WE NEED ANOTHER 
FALL GUY??????? THAT GETS AWAY WITH BILLIONS AND SAYS TO CONGRESS ---- SO WHAT 
ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT NOW???? Public opinion is important to me ----- 
because I am just one more part of the populous. Skepticism about the way our 
Federal Government is run and performers or those that do not perform is a 
matter too for most all --- that is very unsettling. And at this time in our 
American History the Internet is about the only means we have to conduct a forum in 
a kind of like --- town meeting. So with those thoughts buried deep in my 
mind ----- and because I am an accomplished inventor I began to think about this 
and that with all the back slapping?hub bubs ---back rubs --- chit chat heard 
and seen by our Congress and was put aback in fears that nothing of good could 
come about soon for the saving of our Nation. Then a light come on and I 
thought WE GOT TO BEAT THEM AT THEIR OWN GAME. SO READ ON. THUS IS HOPE YOUR 
FOUNDATION FOR YOUR FAITH IN GOD TO SHINE THROUGH HOW many of us are plagued with 
so much unbelief and suspicions that we seem NOT to be able to carry our own 
loads anymore and have no help for the many less others that are part of our 
fabric and core of our rich and abundant America? Only a very few will ever 
possess the tenacity to bring about change ------- at this time of 325 Million 
maybe 1% to 5% of us can carry the Banner of Freedom proclaiming the RIGHTS to 
LIFE for everyone and POWER PUSH Washington DC for actions needed in our LAWS to 
be re-invigorated and restored in our Republic. Are you in that 1% to 5%? If 
so JOIN IN with the many others that have accepted the challenge to bring about 
change. Do you have a personal issue that lies in your perceptions of the 
problems ----- laid out in televised views and those in print too ----- that 
chime at the dime as it comes in ---- on a TOO DO LIST ---- from those advertisers 
that in essence own the news reporting mediums big or small. Do you buy into 
the dire, despicable and dreadful messages that you get from network news? Or 
do you wait and hold all in abeyance until fully checked out ---- and compared 
with other more creditable, reliable and watchful sources? Not only those as 
mentioned above but the other messages that makes NO NEVER MIND at all ----and 
brings nothing to awaken our conscious thoughts and concerns about making 
things better but all to often distraction comes to subvert those thoughts with 
negative emotions. Who are the TV consumers who would rather be informed about 
what is going on with the Hollywood Stars, paranormal events, UFO?s, who done 
it crime accounts, who is still missing after 8 weeks of reporting and then 
just on and on so much gibberish and opinions from morons that has clogged our 
airwaves. While many times what should be told to all of us is that the 
DEMOCRATIC STATE OF OUR NATION is in jeopardy. Are NOT most of the TV media mogul?s 
empty suits, using media gimmicks that keep the audience distracted, while the 
NEO CON agenda moves on? As our Empire is burning are some more concerned 
Jennifer might get back w/Brad and what will happen w/Jolie & the kids? Now what 
about the lack of HOPE? When giving in and giving up seems to be the only path 
to take----- the lack of HOPE has devoured someone once again ----- but not 
all ----just in that realm where those that have that attitude reside and have 
been consumed. Has NOT Cynicism become a safe platform for many, to jeer, 
deride all in disdain? And has NOT those doing such proved in them their lack of 
HOPE. Was eight years of talking about how much you hated Bush -while utterly 
failing to do anything to stop "him"- really not enough for you? Good Generals 
use diversion tactics to win wars can you really see the scam the NEO CONS are 
running while we just wait, hesitate and buy into public opinion? For out, 
about and throughout our Nation many more will see that the glass is not half 
empty but half full. And in those kinds of folks ---- one will readily see a 
bursting out of HOPE on their faces and in their words and deeds. Then if your 
HOPE is unwavering and you have got some fight left in you ---- to make sure 
right things get done in our Federal Government JOIN in. SO IF THIS FITS WHO YOU 
ARE ------ THEN JOIN IN TODAY the Grass Roots Actions needed to form our own 
THE VOICES OF WE THE PEOPLES ADVOCACY ---WTPA -----in Washington DC. For more 
info contact Dwight Baker ---dbaker007 at stx.rr.com ? login or register to post 
comments 
News As Corporate Property
Submitted by neoconned on Thu, 03/12/2009 - 4:17am. 
The unholy alliance between the Bush administration and the media propaganda 
organ has relegated the real news to unimportance in most people's lives. The 
trivial ("J-Lo's Huge Butt!" "Lindsey Slaps Sam!") gets the attention while 
these important issues are relegated to the back pages of people's minds as too 
boring to attend.
I hope that those who promoted No Child are satisfied that their program of 
dumbing-down the American people has worked marvelously. For now, the really 
important stuff (enriching the wealthy) will never attract their attention. This 
makes the capture of the news as property that much easier.
Hearst Corp. is working up a plan to replace printed newspapers with an 
e-reader, and the proprietary operating system will ensure that Hearst can charge 
by the word if they so chose. That free press that Jefferson deemed vital to 
the political health of an open society will be converted into just another 
profit center, subject to the abuse of the marketplace afflicted by those whose 
wealth relies upon that.
I wish Orwell was still alive, for I'd ask him how he feels about the coming 
Ministry of Truth e-readers, which will give us all the news (and history) 
that we "need" to know - at a costly price.
? login or register to post comments 
Exactly
Submitted by Johnsnottoodist... on Thu, 03/12/2009 - 2:32am. For them the 
enemy is/was anyone who knew and would or would have the chance to speak the 
truth. That is easy to spot. Still fully operational. ? login or register to post 
comments 
Ironic media
Submitted by marty weiss on Wed, 03/11/2009 - 9:31pm. Where there was no 
money-- Buzzflash, OpEdNews, the Rainbow Family, moral courage was not dead. Now 
the newspapers that tried to sell the Bush lies are all dying. Evidently the 
party line doesn't help the bottom line. The only voices of truth neither 
supported, nor were supported by, corporations. The legal shelter corporations have 
enjoyed have been at the expense of American ideals and the people and the 
environment and other nations and every living thing on Earth. One might conclude 
corporate personhood is doomed. Now watch the rats desert the sinking ship. 
They could probably get Madoff to lecture on Corporate Social Responsibility as 
they continue to spew mercury and heavy metals into the air. After all, they 
don't breathe the same air as the rest of us. But their children with ADD, 
Autism, Diabetes, and psychotic behavior do. And they grow up in a society chock 
full of psychotic behavior. Is an attack by a complete stranger or a 
murder/suicide in their future? The vultures are coming home to roost. ? login or 
register to post comments 
Was this only in the US? 
Submitted by indice on Thu, 03/12/2009 - 12:09am. Was this only in the US? 
Benazir Bhutto? "US President George W. Bush condemned the assassination as a 
'cowardly act by murderous extremists...'" ... which seems an apt description of 
the Squad. ? login or register to post comments 
SY HEARCH STORY
Submitted by joyce thacker on Thu, 03/12/2009 - 10:34am. I HAVE STRONGLY , 
BELIEVED PAUL WELLSTONE, WAS A ,: HIT:, HE WANTED AN INVESTIGATION INTO 9/11 ? 
login or register to post comments 
There were probably others
Submitted by alankdkd on Thu, 03/12/2009 - 11:24am. 
Don't forget the Republican information-technology expert that help rig 
elections. He died when his private plane was sabotaged and crashed just before he 
was going to be compelled to testify.
These Republicans are Nazis, and they're as powerful as ever despite the last 
two elections.
? login or register to post comments 
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From garyfranchi at gmail.com  Thu Mar 12 13:34:54 2009
From: garyfranchi at gmail.com (Gary Franchi)
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 11:34:54 -0600
Subject: [CitizensTruth] 911 Truth on PBS
Message-ID: <2c9e41bb0903121034l59111adcyfcb37c6b3188d719@mail.gmail.com>

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjceDlGRp2s
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From Walterb306 at cs.com  Thu Mar 12 14:02:55 2009
From: Walterb306 at cs.com (Walterb306 at cs.com)
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:02:55 EDT
Subject: [CitizensTruth] ARTICLE - Freeman hits Israeli lobby on way out
Message-ID: <c19.517983f6.36eaa84f@cs.com>

All,

FYI,

Beverley

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/19856_Page2.html
Freeman hits 'Israel lobby' on way out
By BEN SMITH | 3/10/09 5:01 PM EDT

President Barack Obama's controversial pick for a top intelligence post 
blasted the "Israel lobby" on his way out the door Tuesday, intensifying a debate 
on the role Israel's allies played in the latest failed Obama appointment. 

Charles W. Freeman Jr.'s abrupt withdrawal from his appointment as chairman 
of the National Intelligence Council came after he drew fire on a number of 
fronts - including questions about his financial ties to China and Saudi Arabia. 

But the most heated opposition came from supporters of Israel - and Freeman's 
departure shows Obama's reluctance to signal a change to a U.S. policy in the 
Middle East that centers on standing beside Israel. 

Throughout his presidential campaign, Obama jettisoned aides and backed off 
statements that appeared to imply a change in the Bush Administration's firm 
support for hawkish Israeli governments. 

As president, Obama dispatched Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the 
Middle East last week with a tough message for the Palestinians, saying it was 
hard for Israel to make peace with people who are hurling rockets into their 
country. 

And the attacks on Freeman, in the end, hinged primarily on the question of 
Israel, something the Democratic senators who helped break the back of the 
nomination Tuesday made clear. 

"His statements against Israel were way over the top and severely out of step 
with the administration," said Senator Chuck Schumer in a statement. "I 
repeatedly urged the White House to reject him, and I am glad they did the right 
thing." 

Hours before the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, expressed 
his "regret" at Freeman's withdrawal, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) told Blair 
he was concerned about "statements that [Freeman]'s made that appear either to 
be inclined to lean against Israel or too much in favor of China." 

In particular, Freeman has described "Israeli violence against Palestinians" 
as a key barrier to Mideast peace, and referred to violence in Tibet last year 
- widely seen in the United States as a revolt against Chinese occupation - 
as a "race riot." 

Freeman left no doubt about where he places blame in a written statement 
after his withdrawal. 

"The libels on me and their easily traceable email trails show conclusively 
that there is a powerful lobby determined to prevent any view other than its 
own from being aired, still less to factor in American understanding of trends 
and events in the Middle East," he wrote. 

"The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency 
and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful 
distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for 
the truth." 

Freeman's departure echoed moments during last year's presidential campaign 
when Obama - generally willing to ignore the daily political tempests - 
abandoned aides and advisers who drew strong, persistent criticism on the question of 
Israel, which became, in the politics of the presidential campaign, a proxy 
issue for more general toughness on Islamic terrorism. 

He forced an informal advisor, former Clinton administration peace negotiator 
Rob Malley, to resign after he met with Hamas officials on behalf of the 
International Crisis Group. And he distanced himself from Carter National Security 
Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had been, briefly, a high-profile campaign 
figure. Later Obama, asked about his views on Israel, dismissed Brzezinski as 
"not one of my key advisers." 

Pro-Israel groups and congressional critics were at pains to avoid labeling 
the Freeman withdrawal as a scalp for the "Lobby," stressing instead the role 
Freeman's financial ties played in his fall. Saudi royals financed Freeman's 
think tank, and he served on the board of a Chinese state oil company. 

"I think he would have been able to withstand that if it was just a policy 
difference," said Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), a leading congressional critic. "What 
was fatal was a lack of disclosure
Some may see the hand of the 'Israel Lobby,'" said Ira Forman, the executive 
director of the National Jewish Democratic Council. "But given Freeman's lack 
of intelligence experience, and his willingness to offend multiple 
constituencies, that would be a terribly simplistic view of the world."
But the campaign against Freeman certainly originated in pro-Israel circles - 
though Freeman was nominated after those concerns became known. 

The first public opposition to the pick came on the blog of Steve Rosen, a 
former lobbyist for the pro-Israel group AIPAC who is facing trial for 
mishandling classified information. The story was driven on the website of The Weekly 
Standard by the magazine's blogger, Michael Goldfarb, a former aide to Senator 
John McCain and an outspoken Israel hawk. 

But Jewish and pro-Israel organizations largely decided not to make the fight 
against Freeman a public crusade, though they were the first, and fiercest, 
Freeman opponents and made their views known privately. 

"The vast majority of the Jewish community [were] very careful not to make 
this a Jewish community issue," said a top official at one major pro-Israel 
organization.
And indeed, some officials said Israel's allies might be winning the Freeman 
battle at the expense of larger goals. 

"This is another example of what I call the 'cosmic oy vey,'" said Aaron 
David Miller, a former longtime Mideast policy official. "It's an inability of 
many in the pro-Israeli community to understand the fundamental commitment of 
this government to Israel." 

"If the pro-Israeli community wants to worry about something, let them worry 
about the predicament the Israelis are now in" with Hamas, Hezbollah, and 
Iran, he said. 

But with the news of Freeman's withdrawal, some in that community were glad 
to take credit. 

"What it showed is that there's no place for that kind of hostility to 
America's closest friend and most loyal ally," said a top official at a major Jewish 
organization who had worked against the choice. 

Freeman and his allies were quick to place blame. 

"If they withdraw his appointment prior to the conclusion of [Freeman's 
formal vetting] that would be seen as abject caving in on people who are extreme 
partisans of Israel," Nicholas Veliotes, a former Ambassador to Egypt, and one 
of 17 former diplomats who signed a letters supporting Freeman, said Tuesday 
before the withdrawal was announced. 

Another prominent former diplomat who, like Veliotes, signed a letter 
supporting Freeman warned that the withdrawal would be perceived "right or wrong as a 
major victory of Israel lobby, and it will be read in a substantial part of 
the Arab or Palestinian world as 'these guys - [the Obama administration] -- 
can't broker a peace.' " 

And Freeman warned in his emailed statement that the campaign against him ran 
counter to American interests. 

"I believe that the inability of the American public to discuss, or the 
government to consider, any option for U.S. policies in the Middle East opposed by 
the ruling faction in Israeli politics has allowed that faction to adopt and 
sustain policies that ultimately threaten the existence of the state of Israel. 
It is not permitted for anyone in the United States to say so," he wrote. 
"This is not just a tragedy for Israelis and their neighbors in the Middle East; 
it is doing widening damage to the national security of the United States." 

One place where Freeman found no defenders, though, was the Obama White House 
- which prepared talking points and dossiers to defend other troubled 
nominees - but which stayed on the sidelines during the Freeman fight. 

"The political people, and the [National Security Council] didn't seem to be 
in the loop on this," said one official who spoke to Obama aides about the 
question.

    
Second stimulus? Never heard of it!
 
Reaction to a second stimulus on Hill has been almost uniformly negative.
Obama tiptoes into earmark battle
 
His failure to specify real cuts may come back to haunt him.
Centrist Dems dodge labor bill
 
Moderate Dems are hoping that EFCA somehow goes away.
Obama goes soft on pork
 
Obama largely sides with his Hill allies in unveiling an earmark proposal.
The campaign to boost Bush
 
A handful of aides are still spinning for the former president.
Murtha's 'earmark factory'
 
Sources assert he steers funds to PMA clients via a Penn State research 
center.


Reader's Comments (362)
read all 362 comments 
Show the first 20 comments
POST
Replies: 362      
    Hardrada
Party: Liberal  Reply #1
Date: Mar. 10, 2009 - 5:11 PM EST 
________________________________________
Boo... I liked this guy. He's a straight shooter.
 Reply      Quote      Report Abuse

    Claudius
Party: Republican   Reply #2
Date: Mar. 10, 2009 - 5:13 PM EST 
________________________________________
Score another victory for Israel which continues to dictate our foreign 
policy. AIPAC 1 American 0. The tail continues to wag the St. Bernard.
________________________________________
THE GOP IS PART OF THE TALIBAN CULT AND IS LEAD BY OMAR BEN LIMBAU 
 Reply      Quote      Report Abuse

    DieHardFredHead
Party: Conservative Reply #3
Date: Mar. 10, 2009 - 5:19 PM EST 
________________________________________
 Reply      Quote      Report Abuse

    Hank G
Party: Independent  Reply #4
Date: Mar. 10, 2009 - 5:27 PM EST 
________________________________________
TeamPOLITICO: Mar. 10, 2009 - 5:01 PM EST 
But Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), one of Freeman's leading critics, said the 
appointee could have "withstood" the attacks on policy grounds, but ultimately was 
torpedoed by the fact that he headed an institute funded by Saudi royalty and 
sat on the board of a Chinese state oil company.
It's beginning to look like there isn't clean 'Rat to found...anywhere. 
Either that or Obama's choices have all been taken from the FBI's most wanted list!
________________________________________
Make the world a better place...teach a liberal to think, but understand, 
it's a tiring grueling thankless job, Shucks it's even scary sometimes! 
 Reply      Quote      Report Abuse

    claudiatucsonaz
Party: Democrat Reply #5
Date: Mar. 10, 2009 - 5:29 PM EST 
________________________________________
It is amazing to me how the Repubs, all of a sudden, have a conscious. Where 
were they when Jr. Bush was appointing inept people? Look where they led us! I 
really hate to see our appointees buckle down to the GOP
claudiatucsonaz
 Reply      Quote      Report Abuse

    I Do Vote
Party: Democrat Reply #6
Date: Mar. 10, 2009 - 5:35 PM EST 
________________________________________
TeamPOLITICO: Mar. 10, 2009 - 5:01 PM EST 
The withdrawal came after Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) grilled Blair at a 
Senate Armed Service Committee hearing Tuesday. Lieberman cited his "concern" 
about "statements that [Freeman] has made that appear either to be inclined to 
lean against Israel or too much in favor of China."
Former President Jimmy Carter should consider serving in that position.
 Reply      Quote      Report Abuse

    RightStuff
Party: Republican   Reply #7
Date: Mar. 10, 2009 - 5:36 PM EST 
________________________________________
We elected a straw man for president. He has no following that is not corrupt 
in some way. President Obama is not up for the task. He needs to humble 
himself, start doing the right things, find some honest people to work with him, 
and above all, stop ticking off the pope. The Obama "administration" so far, is 
a train wreck.
________________________________________
Man's nature is to be free. Government's nature is to control. The despot's 
nature is to enslave through fear. Is everyone happy now? 
 Reply      Quote      Report Abuse

    Claudius
Party: Republican   Reply #8
Date: Mar. 10, 2009 - 5:36 PM EST 
________________________________________
claudiatucsonaz: Mar. 10, 2009 - 5:29 PM EST 
I really hate to see our appointees buckle down to the GOP
Pobrecita de ti muchacha, they buckled to Lieberman and AIPEC.
________________________________________
The Tire Safety Division of the Department of Transportation has declared 
Rush to be dangerously over-inflated. 
 Reply      Quote      Report Abuse

    W. Axl Rose
Party: NA   Reply #9
Date: Mar. 10, 2009 - 5:37 PM EST 
________________________________________
Another one bites the dust!! I love it!!
________________________________________
I hope he fails. 
 Reply      Quote      Report Abuse

    Constitutional Lawyer
Party: Liberal  Reply #10
Date: Mar. 10, 2009 - 5:38 PM EST 
________________________________________
Finally. Those of us who personally know this guy and are willing to speak 
without the political spin that Denny must use by virtue of his position, know 
this guy is a buffoon. He has and would continue to make the wrong choice for 
the Middle East that would result in prolonging the establishment of the 
Palestinian State .
Too many times he has spoken under his breath about his support for HAMMAS 
and HEZBOLLA as well as his true hatred for Israel. Wrong ideas, wrong 
intentions,wrong guy. What's even more scary is the failure of this administration to 
operate as executives. They are making Carter look good. If they do not get 
their act together soon, then we are all in trouble, regardless of the political 
ilk.
 Reply      Quote      Report Abuse

    RightStuff
Party: Republican   Reply #11
Date: Mar. 10, 2009 - 5:41 PM EST 
________________________________________
claudiatucsonaz: Mar. 10, 2009 - 5:29 PM EST 
It is amazing to me how the Repubs, all of a sudden, have a conscious. Where 
were they when Jr. Bush was appointing inept people? Look where they led us! I 
really hate to see our appointees buckle down to the GOP
Are you illiterate, or what? "Conscious"? "Jr. Bush"? "buckle down"?
How did you do in high school American Government class?
________________________________________
Human liberty and the nanny state are mutually exclusive. 
 Reply      Quote      Report Abuse

    Tamsin Crozier
Party: NA   Reply #12
Date: Mar. 10, 2009 - 5:41 PM EST 
________________________________________
TeamPOLITICO: Mar. 10, 2009 - 5:01 PM EST 
Freeman has described "Israeli violence against Palestinians" as a key 
barrier to Mideast peace
Israel is of course in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions calling 
for an end to its illegal immoral occupations by which it has instituted 
apartheid conditions in the West Bank and turned Gaza into a death camp. We were 
attacked on 9/11 because of our foreign policy favoring Israel, and it's clear 
that if the Israel Lobby maintains its stranglehold on the politicians and the 
media, our country is doomed. We will forever be going bankrupt fighting 
unnecessary wars for Israel. 
Freeman was just trying to point out that an evenhanded policy would be in 
the better interest of the US. This has been well-documented in professors 
Mearsheimer and Walt's classic book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. 
Unfortunately the Israel-firsters like Joe Lieberman love the status quo. 
 Reply      Quote      Report Abuse

    I Do Vote
Party: Democrat Reply #13
Date: Mar. 10, 2009 - 5:42 PM EST 
________________________________________
RightStuff: Mar. 10, 2009 - 5:36 PM EST 
We elected a straw man for president. He has no following that is not corrupt 
in some way. President Obama is not up for the task. He needs to humble 
himself, start doing the right things, find some honest people to work with him, 
and above all, stop ticking off the pope. The Obama "administration" so far, is 
a train wreck.
A train wreck? If this 50 day old administration is a train wreck, how do you 
compare the 8 year old Bush administration?
 Reply      Quote      Report Abuse

    Joe_D
Party: Conservative Reply #14
Date: Mar. 10, 2009 - 5:43 PM EST 
________________________________________
claudiatucsonaz: Mar. 10, 2009 - 5:29 PM EST 
It is amazing to me how the Repubs, all of a sudden, have a conscious. Where 
were they when Jr. Bush was appointing inept people? Look where they led us! I 
really hate to see our appointees buckle down to the GOP
It has nothing to do with conscious, or political philosophy. It has to do 
with the ineptness of the Obama administration to vet its appointees. Both Bush 
and Clinton had a few surprises with their nominees, but for the most part the 
nominees were properly vetted and a closet full of skeletons did not fall out 
when the nominee showed up for a congressional interview. Appointing someone 
to the National Intellegence Council that worked with the Saudi's and Chinese 
may not have been the smartest move. 

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From mjkirk12 at yahoo.com  Thu Mar 12 14:50:17 2009
From: mjkirk12 at yahoo.com (Mike Kirk)
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 11:50:17 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [CitizensTruth] 911 Truth on PBS
In-Reply-To: <2c9e41bb0903121034l59111adcyfcb37c6b3188d719@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <183822.44673.qm@web83804.mail.sp1.yahoo.com>

Most excellent work!?? Building collapses, economic collapses... 

What's next???? Government collapses???

-Mike

--- On Thu, 3/12/09, Gary Franchi <garyfranchi at gmail.com> wrote:
From: Gary Franchi <garyfranchi at gmail.com>
Subject: [CitizensTruth] 911 Truth on PBS
To: 9-11-340 at meetup.com, 9-11-331 at meetup.com, "Citizens Truth" <citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net>
Date: Thursday, March 12, 2009, 12:34 PM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjceDlGRp2s

_______________________________________________
CitizensTruth mailing list
CitizensTruth at six.pairlist.net
http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/citizenstruth
website: http://citizenstruth.info
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From garyfranchi at gmail.com  Thu Mar 12 17:42:04 2009
From: garyfranchi at gmail.com (Gary Franchi)
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:42:04 -0600
Subject: [CitizensTruth] Franchi Exposes Federal Reserve on PBS
Message-ID: <2c9e41bb0903121442v54d01edatda290e6127a98cc9@mail.gmail.com>

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oELV35omv-0
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From mjkirk12 at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 13 13:31:14 2009
From: mjkirk12 at yahoo.com (Mike Kirk)
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 10:31:14 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [CitizensTruth] Is Gold money???
Message-ID: <234766.70143.qm@web83805.mail.sp1.yahoo.com>

In times of crisis and lack of government confidence, yes.


http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig10/rees-mogg3.html

>From the article:? "In extreme circumstances, paper money 
              can lose all its value, when gold is still acceptable as payment. 
              In 1940, when the French Army was defeated, many French people took 
              to their automobiles to escape the advancing Germans. They found 
              that petrol stations would not accept paper francs, but would sell 
              their petrol in exchange for gold coins."

My favorite quotes:

"She has a heart of treasury bonds"
"At the end of every rainbow,? you will find a pot of stocks"
"The goose that laid the paper egg"
"All is not T-bills that glitters"


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From futurenotwritten at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 13 14:13:53 2009
From: futurenotwritten at yahoo.com (Jay Becker)
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 11:13:53 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [CitizensTruth] No time to "wait & see" how many more die!
Message-ID: <28905.30306.qm@web33501.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

END THE OCCUPATIONS NOW!  -- MARCH 14TH RALLY IN PILSEN

    
    Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine!
	Stop the Government's War on Immigrants!
   
    
As we mark the 6th anniversary of the attack on Iraq, and enter the 8th
year with the US in a state of war with the world, we see a whole
planet still threatened by continuation of the policies that emerged
after George Bush invaded Afghanistan, and then Iraq, saying the "war
on terror" justified torture, domestic spying, and even suggested
possible nuclear first strikes anywhere! Over these eight long years,
by the actions of the U.S. and its Israeli partner-in-crime, we have
seen the countries of Syria, Somalia and Pakistan attacked, thousands
of civilians in Lebanon and Gaza killed (with support & approval
from Washington), and Iran surrounded by US troops illegally occupying
Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, in 2009, Bush has left office, but the "war
on terror" continues.
    With
Obama's administration still retaining many of the "tools" of this war,
including "extraordinary" rendition (to torture people in other
countries), escalating use of drone strikes in Pakistan; often killing
whole families with these remote controlled machines that terrorize
thousands, and now a "surge" of 30,000 troops into Afghanistan, the
civilians of these countries find themselves caught in a deadly and
self-perpetuating cycle of terror, both from the Islamic
fundamentalists fighting against the US, and the much greater terror of
US aggression directed at civilians. What we can clearly see, after 7
full years of abject failure, death and destruction, is that this cycle
can only be stopped when the people of those countries, combined with
the actions of people in this country, together refuse to strengthen
either side, and instead confront the certain fact that there is no "good" war on terror, and these are in fact, wars for empire.
    The
same empire that forces people to migrate from countries decimated by
the economic pressures of domination and exploitation, now thirsts for
the blood of the children of immigrants and of other oppressed people,
who are being recruited to join the military and become part of
expanding the war machine. On top of all this, recruiters now lie to
high school students, saying that it's okay to join the military now;
since, with President Obama, the "wars are already over."
    Join
us to act in a way that is so visible and powerful it can be seen all
over the world, especially in the countries that have been targets of
this aggression. 
	THE WORLD CAN'T 'WAIT AND SEE' WHILE WAR CONTINUES!
	 No more wars for empire!
	Saturday March 14th - 12 noon

	gather at Marshall Boulevard & Cermak Road

2 blocks from the "California" stop on the Pink Line "el"), followed by
a march to Pilsen for a closing rally at Loomis and 18th Streets.
	    Your participation will help make this the powerful day of protest and resistance that is so urgently needed.

Contact us right away to get involved: chicago at worldcantwait.org.

See http://www.chicagomassaction.org/ for more about this Chicago day of action.

View-Save-Print-Post-E-Mail the Flyer for this Event!  Open & Save the PDF Flyer



    Stop thinking like an American, 
Start thinking about humanity!



      
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From geri at thetwofacesofmoney.com  Fri Mar 13 17:17:46 2009
From: geri at thetwofacesofmoney.com (Geri Perry)
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 16:17:46 -0500
Subject: [CitizensTruth] Is Gold money???
In-Reply-To: <234766.70143.qm@web83805.mail.sp1.yahoo.com>
References: <234766.70143.qm@web83805.mail.sp1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <49BACD7A.6030508@thetwofacesofmoney.com>

I cannot for the life of me understand why Rockwell perpetuates such 
half truths!!

UNLESS  . . .

Rockwell's function is to forward the message of the money elite via tax 
exempt foundations aka "think tanks". According to an article in Reason 
Magazine Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr is the founder of the Ludwig von Mises 
Institute - which was funded by the Volcker Foundation. (Also see this 
article for the surprising connection to Marxism: 
http://populistindependent.org/ ) Von Mises in turn earned his money in 
a Rockefeller Foundation funded business research institute. 
http://www.ssrc.org/programs/thinktanks/Plehwe.pdf

Rockwell was also, according to Reason, the person responsible for those 
controversial and highly racist articles that caused the Paul campaign 
such angst in the last presidential selection. See: 
http://www.reason.com/news/show/124426.html

BOTTOM LINE is Neither Gold nor silver is money - not even in times of 
crisis!

After all, you can't eat gold. AND gold can be confiscated or outlawed. 
Witness FDR's confiscation of the PEOPLE"S gold in order to pay off the 
debt to the International Bankers.

Consider, in line with this - as per Galbraith in his discussion of 
extreme circumstances and paper money: /In both Britain and Germany as 
[World War II] proceeded, the ration coupons became the decisive 
currency. Everyone or almost everyone could obtain the requisite pounds 
or marks; it was the availability of a ration ticket that determined 
whether or not a purchase, almost any purchase, could be made. In 
contrast with the more traditional means of exchange, the ration ticket 
is, with privileged exceptions, available to all in equal amounts. (p254)

/Ask yourself, why were ration coupons more valuable as "money"? Did the 
gold disappear?

And there's this quoted directly from the Money Masters: / Our country 
needs a solid group who REALLY understands how our money is manipulated 
and what the solutions REALLY are - because if a depression comes there 
will be those who call themselves "conservatives" who will come forward 
advancing solutions framed by the international bankers. *Be ware of 
calls to return to a gold standard.* /

Then there's this from International Bankster himself, Alexander 
Hamilton: " It is immaterial what serves the purpose of money, whether 
paper or gold and silver; that the effect of both upon industry is the 
same; and that the intrinsic wealth of a nation is to be measured, not 
by the abundance of the precious metals contained in it, but by the 
quantity of the productions of its labor and industry."

LOTS MORE of those kinds of Examples. Perhaps its time to stop paying 
homage to Rockwell, or any other well funded group, right or left.

As Antony Sutton warned in 1982:  "More effective than outright 
censorship is use of the left-right political spectrum to neutralize 
unwelcome facts and ideas or just condition citizens to think along 
certain lines. .."


gerip

/


/
Mike Kirk wrote:
> In times of crisis and lack of government confidence, yes.
>
> http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig10/rees-mogg3.html
>
> From the article:  "In extreme circumstances, paper money can lose all 
> its value, when gold is still acceptable as payment. In 1940, when the 
> French Army was defeated, many French people took to their automobiles 
> to escape the advancing Germans. They found that petrol stations would 
> not accept paper francs, but would sell their petrol in exchange for 
> gold coins."
>
> My favorite quotes:
>
> "She has a heart of treasury bonds"
> "At the end of every rainbow,  you will find a pot of stocks"
> "The goose that laid the paper egg"
> "All is not T-bills that glitters"
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> CitizensTruth mailing list
> CitizensTruth at six.pairlist.net
> http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/citizenstruth
> website: http://citizenstruth.info
>   

From geri at thetwofacesofmoney.com  Fri Mar 13 18:06:49 2009
From: geri at thetwofacesofmoney.com (Geri Perry)
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 17:06:49 -0500
Subject: [CitizensTruth] Franchi Exposes Federal Reserve on PBS
In-Reply-To: <2c9e41bb0903121442v54d01edatda290e6127a98cc9@mail.gmail.com>
References: <2c9e41bb0903121442v54d01edatda290e6127a98cc9@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <49BAD8F9.2070102@thetwofacesofmoney.com>

REALLY Great job Gary . .

Except for one not-so-small item, which we MUST get a handle on SOON.

PLEASE, PLEASE - I BEG OF YOU ALL - STRIVE TO UNDERSTAND THIS IMPORTANT 
POINT . WE ARE RUNNING OUT OF TIME ON THIS ONE!

As you correctly stated Gary,  the problem with Fed notes is the 
interest charged to us for the use of said notes. However, our currency 
is losing value because of accumulating debt - NOT inflation (although 
inflation does occur within market sectors, due to targeted "credit 
expansion" of those sectors, which in turn causes bubbles which in turn 
must collapse. Its a math problem, not a "paper" problem).

Our current problem is DEFLATION and the reason is that asset values are 
still collapsing. Under the current, unbelievably corrupt system we need 
to pump "money" - in the form of debt payable by we the taxpayer - into 
the system. Owing to the hundreds of trillions of dollars in outstanding 
"bad asset" derivatives we, and the entire globe, are now being consumed 
alive by an insatiable money creation monster. Around the bend are 
escalating interest rates, which is what brought down the Weimar 
Republic. Inflation in this context is a false canard!!

BUT silver backed notes will be every bit a bad as Fed notes. Consider 
for example that we were officially on the Gold standard between 1900 
and 1933, and look where that got us!! The ONLY, TRUE, CONSTITUTIONAL 
solution is to demand the Congress "coin - as in create - money and 
regulate the value thereof".

PLEASE watch these three video clips CAREFULLY, VERY CAREFULLY. They 
nicely explain, using a different approach than I do, exactly why gold 
and silver are not money, under 28 minutes total time for all 3. Part 1 
(links in margin to #2 & #3): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E0UPBtmTb0

And for an excellent history of currency with actual examples of both 
currency - backed and unbacked by silver or gold -  and coins including 
the Liberty dollar,  again in 3 parts, less than 25 minutes total, part 
1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFX2unX_VIs&feature=related

THEN go to my website and read everything on it, including the slide 
presentation - and maybe even Part 2 of my book.

As Bill Still of the Money Masters says, and this is a direct quote: 
/Monetary reform is the single most important issue of our time. Educate 
your friends and family, state and local officials, and your members of 
Congress. Our country needs a solid group who REALLY understands how our 
money is manipulated and what the solutions REALLY are - because if a 
depression comes there will be those who call themselves "conservatives" 
who will come forward advancing solutions framed by the international 
bankers. *Be ware of calls to return to a gold standard.*/


Your fellow truth seeker,
gerip

Gary Franchi wrote:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oELV35omv-0
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> CitizensTruth mailing list
> CitizensTruth at six.pairlist.net
> http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/citizenstruth
> website: http://citizenstruth.info
>   

From mjkirk12 at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 13 18:22:55 2009
From: mjkirk12 at yahoo.com (Mike Kirk)
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:22:55 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [CitizensTruth] Is Gold money???
In-Reply-To: <49BACD7A.6030508@thetwofacesofmoney.com>
Message-ID: <608697.972.qm@web83816.mail.sp1.yahoo.com>

OK OK, so even in crisis gold/silver is not money.?? Perhaps it would be better if I called them "gold/silver barter coins' instead of money? ? :-)?? Whatever I call them, I am confident that someone
would be willing to accept them for things I need - food, weapons, shelter, etc.

Why did Roosevelt confiscate the people's gold??? Because it had intrinsic value!? It allowed him to inflate the money supply with fiat money.? Roosevelt should have been impeached for this treasonous act.

Did Lew Rockwell and similar think-tanks originate the legends of pirates on the high seas????? What things of value did the legendary pirates put in their
treasure chests: diamonds, silver, gold - or paper fiat money?

If the government that spends the fiat paper money into circulation
becomes defunct, I would rather have gold, silver or similar commodity
in my possession - it has intrinsic value.?? Would you take Zimbabwe currency these days - not
me.?? http://tinyurl.com/6223tw

Democracy (or any form of government) collapses when the majority discovers it can vote for itself (create out of thin air) treasure from the public coffers. ? Let the people decide what they want to use for money - it keeps the politicians and bankers from corrupting the system with their lies and deceit - like fractional reserve banking.

I fail to understand how a government can be allowed to create 'debt free money'.? If "We the People" are the government, then can "We the People" create our own 'debt free money' as well??? Probably not, it would be counterfeiting, correct?

A government (or banking system) in complete control of the money supply will eventually enslave it's people with debt (or burden them with excessive taxation).

-Mike

--- On Fri, 3/13/09, Geri Perry <geri at thetwofacesofmoney.com> wrote:
From: Geri Perry <geri at thetwofacesofmoney.com>
Subject: Re: [CitizensTruth] Is Gold money???
To: "Mike Kirk" <mjkirk12 at yahoo.com>
Cc: citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net
Date: Friday, March 13, 2009, 4:17 PM

I cannot for the life of me understand why Rockwell perpetuates such half
truths!!

UNLESS  . . .

Rockwell's function is to forward the message of the money elite via tax
exempt foundations aka "think tanks". According to an article in
Reason Magazine Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr is the founder of the Ludwig von Mises
Institute - which was funded by the Volcker Foundation. (Also see this article
for the surprising connection to Marxism: http://populistindependent.org/ ) Von
Mises in turn earned his money in a Rockefeller Foundation funded business
research institute. http://www.ssrc.org/programs/thinktanks/Plehwe.pdf

Rockwell was also, according to Reason, the person responsible for those
controversial and highly racist articles that caused the Paul campaign such
angst in the last presidential selection. See:
http://www.reason.com/news/show/124426.html

BOTTOM LINE is Neither Gold nor silver is money - not even in times of crisis!
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From mjkirk12 at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 13 18:48:42 2009
From: mjkirk12 at yahoo.com (Mike Kirk)
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:48:42 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [CitizensTruth] Is Gold money???
Message-ID: <372351.4374.qm@web83807.mail.sp1.yahoo.com>


As a follow up,? I am well-aware of? Lew Rockwell's racist comments - he's no angel.?? But neither is the dear departed radio-man Paul Harvey, who thought biological warfare and slavery were 'a good thing'.? http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2569


All people have flaws - we need to focus on the merits of the ideas and not the person.

Also, Rockwell was not the author of the article I forwarded.? It was originally published in Australia at the following link:??? 
http://www.dailyreckoning.com.au/is-gold-money/2009/03/12

Which I don't think is funded by Volcker or Rockefeller.? :-)

Regards,
-Mike


--- On Fri, 3/13/09, Mike Kirk <mjkirk12 at yahoo.com> wrote:
From: Mike Kirk <mjkirk12 at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [CitizensTruth] Is Gold money???
To: "Geri Perry" <geri at thetwofacesofmoney.com>
Cc: citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net
Date: Friday, March 13, 2009, 5:22 PM

OK OK, so even in crisis gold/silver is not money.?? Perhaps it would be better if I called them "gold/silver barter coins' instead of money? ? :-)?? Whatever I call them, I am confident that someone
would be willing to accept them for things I need - food, weapons, shelter, etc.

Why did Roosevelt confiscate the people's gold??? Because it had intrinsic value!? It allowed him to inflate the money supply with fiat money.? Roosevelt should have been impeached for this treasonous act.

Did Lew Rockwell and similar think-tanks originate the legends of pirates on the high seas????? What things of value did the legendary pirates put in their
treasure chests: diamonds, silver, gold - or paper fiat money?

If the government that spends the fiat paper money into circulation
becomes defunct, I would rather have gold, silver or similar commodity
in my possession - it has intrinsic value.?? Would you take Zimbabwe currency these days - not
me.?? http://tinyurl.com/6223tw

Democracy (or any form of government) collapses when the majority discovers it can vote for itself (create out of thin air) treasure from the public coffers. ? Let the people decide what they want to use for money - it keeps the politicians and bankers from corrupting the system with their lies and deceit - like fractional reserve banking.

I fail to understand how a government can be allowed to create 'debt free money'.? If "We the People" are the government, then can "We the People" create our own 'debt free money' as well??? Probably not, it would be counterfeiting, correct?

A government (or banking system) in complete control of the money supply will eventually enslave it's people with debt (or burden them with excessive taxation).

-Mike

--- On Fri, 3/13/09, Geri Perry <geri at thetwofacesofmoney.com> wrote:
From: Geri Perry <geri at thetwofacesofmoney.com>
Subject: Re: [CitizensTruth] Is Gold money???
To: "Mike Kirk" <mjkirk12 at yahoo.com>
Cc: citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net
Date: Friday, March 13, 2009, 4:17 PM

I cannot for the life of me understand why Rockwell perpetuates such half
truths!!

UNLESS  . . .

Rockwell's function is to forward the message of the money elite via tax
exempt foundations aka "think tanks". According to an article in
Reason Magazine Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr is the founder of the Ludwig von Mises
Institute - which was funded by the Volcker Foundation. (Also see this article
for the surprising connection to Marxism: http://populistindependent.org/ ) Von
Mises in turn earned his money in a Rockefeller Foundation funded business
research institute.
 http://www.ssrc.org/programs/thinktanks/Plehwe.pdf

Rockwell was also, according to Reason, the person responsible for those
controversial and highly racist articles that caused the Paul campaign such
angst in the last presidential selection. See:
http://www.reason.com/news/show/124426.html

BOTTOM LINE is Neither Gold nor silver is money - not even in times of crisis!
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From geri at thetwofacesofmoney.com  Fri Mar 13 19:10:04 2009
From: geri at thetwofacesofmoney.com (Geri Perry)
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 18:10:04 -0500
Subject: [CitizensTruth] Is Gold money???
In-Reply-To: <608697.972.qm@web83816.mail.sp1.yahoo.com>
References: <608697.972.qm@web83816.mail.sp1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <49BAE7CC.9090203@thetwofacesofmoney.com>

Mike etal,

Re: Someone would be willing to accept [gold/silver] for things I need.

--- Maybe. Maybe not - if government made such things illegal.But even 
if "someone" would be able to accept gold/silver in exchange for 
something you needed, how would your gold/silver be valued by that 
"someone". What kind of guarantee is there that  it would be a "fair" 
exchange in other words?

RE: Why did Roosevelt confiscate the people's gold? 

--  he confiscated it because the London banking machine wanted to 
revalue gold upwards to $35 an ounce, which is why FDr revalued the gold 
dollar 9 months later, and kept the profit for the government. That move 
helped stabilize England's currency.  Gold has LONG been used by the 
elite to control the masses - and their governments. I suggest you all 
read the very short volume Promise to Pay: An Inquiry into the Modern 
Magic of High Finance by R. McNair Wilson, first published in 1934, 
revised, 2nd edition in 1964 - and still relevant in understanding money 
and the role of gold in "high finance" today (and always).

RE: What things of value did the legendary pirates put in their treasure 
chests: diamonds, silver, gold - or paper fiat money?

 --- These have for 1000s of years been used by the elite as "money" and 
a store of wealth. The pirates were merely stealing what was being 
hoarded by the elite. I'm quite sure that if paper money were on the 
ships the pirates would not be adverse to taking it (and using it for 
goods). (Diamond prices as you know are inflated and controlled by the 
DeBeer's (sp?). Likewise gold, and all commodity prices are manipulated 
by the few who operate the NYMEX , the London Exchange, etc)

The only things with REAL intrinsic values are food, water and air (and 
our labor).

As to Zimbabwe, you must have missed my post on that. But here is a snip 
from another post: Our current problem is DEFLATION and the reason is 
that asset values are still collapsing. Under the current, unbelievably 
corrupt system we need to pump "money" - in the form of debt payable by 
we the taxpayer - into the system. Owing to the hundreds of trillions of 
dollars in outstanding "bad asset" derivatives we, and the entire globe, 
are now being consumed alive by an insatiable money creation monster. 
Around the bend are escalating interest rates, which is what brought 
down the Weimar Republic. Inflation in this context is a false canard!!

As to money creation, I am BEGGING you to CAREFULLY CONSIDER analyzing 
what I and others are saying instead of blindly following Lew Rockwell & 
Co. and note that I used to follow Daily Reckoning as well, they WERE 
right about the RE collapse, but they go off the mark elsewhere a little 
too often for my taste.

Anyway, PLEASE do me a HUGE FAVOR and watch these three video clips 
CAREFULLY, VERY CAREFULLY, and over again if need be. They nicely 
explain, using a different approach than I do, exactly why gold and 
silver are not money and who is the least trustworthy to handle money 
creation , under 28 minutes total time for all 3. Part 1 (links in 
margin to #2 & #3): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E0UPBtmTb0

Your eternal friend in truth,
gerip


Mike Kirk wrote:
> OK OK, so even in crisis gold/silver is not money.   Perhaps it would 
> be better if I called them "gold/silver barter coins' instead of 
> money?   :-)   Whatever I call them, I am confident that someone would 
> be willing to accept them for things I need - food, weapons, shelter, etc.
>
> Why did Roosevelt confiscate the people's gold?   Because it had 
> intrinsic value!  It allowed him to inflate the money supply with fiat 
> money.  Roosevelt should have been impeached for this treasonous act.
>
> Did Lew Rockwell and similar think-tanks originate the legends of 
> pirates on the high seas?     What things of value did the legendary 
> pirates put in their treasure chests: diamonds, silver, gold - or 
> paper fiat money?
>
> If the government that spends the fiat paper money into circulation 
> becomes defunct, I would rather have gold, silver or similar commodity 
> in my possession - it has intrinsic value.   Would you take Zimbabwe 
> currency these days - not me.   *http://tinyurl.com/6223tw*
>
> Democracy (or any form of government) collapses when the majority 
> discovers it can vote for itself (create out of thin air) treasure 
> from the public coffers.   Let the people decide what they want to use 
> for money - it keeps the politicians and bankers from corrupting the 
> system with their lies and deceit - like fractional reserve banking.
>
> I fail to understand how a government can be allowed to create 'debt 
> free money'.  If "We the People" are the government, then can "We the 
> People" create our own 'debt free money' as well?   Probably not, it 
> would be counterfeiting, correct?
>
> A government (or banking system) in complete control of the money 
> supply will eventually enslave it's people with debt (or burden them 
> with excessive taxation).
>
> -Mike
>
> --- On *Fri, 3/13/09, Geri Perry /<geri at thetwofacesofmoney.com>/* wrote:
>
>     From: Geri Perry <geri at thetwofacesofmoney.com>
>     Subject: Re: [CitizensTruth] Is Gold money???
>     To: "Mike Kirk" <mjkirk12 at yahoo.com>
>     Cc: citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net
>     Date: Friday, March 13, 2009, 4:17 PM
>
>     I cannot for the life of me understand why Rockwell perpetuates such half
>     truths!!
>
>     UNLESS  . . .
>
>     Rockwell's function is to forward the message of the money elite via tax
>     exempt foundations aka "think tanks". According to an article in
>     Reason Magazine Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr is the founder of the Ludwig von Mises
>     Institute - which was funded by the Volcker Foundation. (Also see this article
>     for the surprising connection to Marxism: http://populistindependent.org/ ) Von
>     Mises in turn earned his money in a Rockefeller Foundation funded business
>     research institute.
>      http://www.ssrc.org/programs/thinktanks/Plehwe.pdf
>
>     Rockwell was also, according to Reason, the person responsible for those
>     controversial and highly racist articles that caused the Paul campaign such
>     angst in the last presidential selection. See:
>     http://www.reason.com/news/show/124426.html
>
>     BOTTOM LINE is Neither Gold nor silver is money - not even in times of crisis!
>               
>

From geri at thetwofacesofmoney.com  Sat Mar 14 17:14:21 2009
From: geri at thetwofacesofmoney.com (Geri Perry)
Date: Sat, 14 Mar 2009 16:14:21 -0500
Subject: [CitizensTruth] William Cooper's War with Alex Jones
Message-ID: <49BC1E2D.3010500@thetwofacesofmoney.com>

Hi all,

Please just carefully consider the following, and DON"T shoot the 
messenger! Just consider the FACTS, ALL of the FACTS as they are 
presented in these clips. Then make up your own mind.

First, some questions.

Have you ever noticed that Alex Jones is continually warning about 
impending Armageddon in a manner which specifically encourages anger, 
extreme anxiety/agitation, and even armed revolution? Or how he would 
rail on about how the elections were totally rigged and "controlled by 
the CIA", and in the next breath tell us to donate all we could to 
"elect" Ron Paul? Or how he summarily and often rudely dismisses any 
challenges to his "facts', most especially when it comes to "free" 
energy and its twin issue - which has to do with the "alternative" view 
of how the twin towers were brought down? (An issue yours truly has been 
looking into ever since Dennis Kucinich came out with his first 
Preservation of Space bill, specifically banning what I call 
HAARP-enabled weaponry).

Jones' prima donna attitude can arguably be overlooked, but as for the 
rest - I for one am not so sure.

If any of this has ever tugged at your sub-conscious I urge you to 
PLEASE watch the following video segments. ALL are revealing but 
especially important are those with William Cooper, ex-navy whistle 
blower, author of Behold a Pale Horse, lecturer and host of his own 
radio show, Hour of the Time. Remarkably and perhaps oddly, Cooper had 
predicted 9-11 in June of 2001 - a month BEFORE Jones. Cooper was then 
murdered in November 2001, after at least 2 previous attempts on his 
life, one of which had resulted in loss of a leg.

PLEASE WATCH CAREFULLY - don't just listen - to this short April 8, 2008 
Jones radio segment with a caller talking about "no planers":  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZmYxxeDxfg&feature=related

and another WATCH-don't-just-listen- shorter, 3 minute clip: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHRgPfP8Kt0&feature=related

NOW - PLEASE BE SURE to watch this segment which has 2 pertinent clips 
from Wm. Cooper's radio show Hour of the Time - listen all the way to 
the end of segment: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSBhRhqvPlc&feature=related

AND Cooper on Jones again here where Cooper talks about an incident 
concerning Alex Jones on New Years Eve 1999 about the 3 minute mark: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJ82zk8ycfs&feature=related

this is a shorter one of Cooper predicting 9-11 with bin Laden as the 
fall guy with some details on Cooper's execution: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phKiT2-94XU&feature=related

NOW to the original video which started all this, which nicely explains 
how and when the key components of the 9-11 myth were inserted into the 
public consciousness;

-------- Original Message -------- 
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwq04_KhCeI

From aqmstaffo at mailbag.com  Sat Mar 14 22:16:02 2009
From: aqmstaffo at mailbag.com (Daniel Stafford)
Date: Sat, 14 Mar 2009 21:16:02 -0500
Subject: [CitizensTruth] Banks scramble to return funds
Message-ID: <49BC64E2.7080809@mailbag.com>

Banks scramble to return funds 
<http://www.latimes.com/news/la-fi-tainted-money14-2009mar14,0,4358692.story?track=rss>

Tainted money, now if they can just figure out how to give it back.

L.A. Times
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From hal at drxyzzy.org  Sat Mar 14 23:33:39 2009
From: hal at drxyzzy.org (Hal Snyder)
Date: Sat, 14 Mar 2009 22:33:39 -0500
Subject: [CitizensTruth] Banks scramble to return funds
In-Reply-To: <49BC64E2.7080809@mailbag.com>
References: <49BC64E2.7080809@mailbag.com>
Message-ID: <0F198220-CDC0-4159-81B4-C1F9B5E50F3D@drxyzzy.org>

"For Rothenberg, the banker in Century City, the prospect of unlimited  
government intervention was too much.

Comment: Good thing the darn government wasn't meddling in banking the  
last 8 years. Think of the mess we'd be in.

'The real issue was the clause that the government could change any of  
the terms," he said. "It was so open-ended.'

Comment: Dude must have never been on the receiving end of a credit  
card agreement. Imagine the other side saying it can change the rules  
any time.

Of course the real indignity of the TARP funds is the specter of  
accountability. The people are getting uppity, wanting to know what  
goes on in the offices of their betters. Where is Dick Cheney when we  
need him? Secrecy is for the rulers, transparency and suspicion for  
the lowly subjects.


On Mar 14, 2009, at 9:16 PM, Daniel Stafford wrote:

> Banks scramble to return funds <http://www.latimes.com/news/la-fi-tainted-money14-2009mar14,0,4358692.story?track=rss 
> >
>
> Tainted money, now if they can just figure out how to give it back.
>
> L.A. Times

From edward_rynearson at yahoo.com  Sun Mar 15 13:02:09 2009
From: edward_rynearson at yahoo.com (Edward Rynearson)
Date: Sun, 15 Mar 2009 10:02:09 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [CitizensTruth] AIs lex Jones promoting armed insurection?
In-Reply-To: <mailman.11.1237132825.48600.citizenstruth@six.pairlist.net>
Message-ID: <616974.47436.qm@web30008.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

"Have you ever noticed that Alex Jones is continually warning about 
impending Armageddon in a manner which specifically encourages anger, 
extreme anxiety/agitation, and even armed revolution? "
?
No I haven't.
?
I listen to him every day and he tells people that resorting to violence will play right into the hands of the globalists.???
?
What Alex has been warning against just heppened.? 
?
Edward Rynearson
?
?
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From edward_rynearson at yahoo.com  Sun Mar 15 16:13:16 2009
From: edward_rynearson at yahoo.com (Edward Rynearson)
Date: Sun, 15 Mar 2009 13:13:16 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [CitizensTruth] Review: The Obama Deception by Alex Jones
Message-ID: <419862.89440.qm@web30007.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

http://edwardrynearson.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/review-the-obama-deception-by-alex-jones/
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From geri at thetwofacesofmoney.com  Sun Mar 15 18:10:16 2009
From: geri at thetwofacesofmoney.com (Geri Perry)
Date: Sun, 15 Mar 2009 17:10:16 -0500
Subject: [CitizensTruth] Economist Michel Chossudovsky on America's fiscal
	collapse
Message-ID: <49BD7CC8.50301@thetwofacesofmoney.com>

Interview by Bonnie Faulkner on Guns and Butter, one hour: 
http://kpfa.org/archive/id/49073

Some notes:

The numbers are astounding, and horrifying. . . .We 're in a very 
serious situation - the most serious crisis in modern history. Defense 
spending and the bank bailouts are eating up the totality of Fed 
revenues, and exacerbate the crisis because the real truth is that 
stimulus money is NOT going to the real economy. We're really looking at 
a fiscal collapse, not a fiscal crisis, because virtually every category 
of public expenditure is threatened.

Worse, low interest rates (which notably do not apply to consumer 
credit) means few will be purchasing U.S. debt in the form of Treasury 
Bills and Bonds while at the same time low interest rates encourage 
another speculative onslaught by the financial economy. Treasury thus 
lacks the ability to finance its operations.

Worse yet, the banks are not only the recipients of public money but a 
big portion of the US debt is held by the banks, allowing the banks to 
dictate policy - and basically control EVERYTHING. The public money 
going to the banks is being used by the banks to buy up public assets 
(and speculate with derivatives).

This means State and local taxes will skyrocket. Meanwhile the upward 
transfer of wealth to the financial economy will further gut the real 
economy due to speculative activity. The FEMA camps being built around 
the country specifically ties in to anticipated unrest.

The people who control the government and the people who support the 
government know very well what they have to do to control dissent. One 
is to control the media, including the alternative media, so that the 
public is completely unaware of the pending impoverishment of the entire 
nation. (and since we have a global economy this impoverishment extends 
to nations around the world, China's economy is collapsing now. 3rd 
world countries already impoverished by IMF structural adjustment loans 
will suffer most, and the collapse of their economies will literally 
drive even greater numbers into death by starvation)
<END OF NOTES>

In short, the system is rigged. Read about the first global crash of 
1345 to find out what may be in store: 
http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_91-96/954_Gallagher_Venice_rig.html

Also WATCH FOR another email titled The World According to Derivatives 
which is about my 7 part series on derivatives which explains the whole 
picture.

THE SOLUTION? Demand Congress get behind Kucinich to create 
Constitutional money and regulate the value thereof.

From geri at thetwofacesofmoney.com  Sun Mar 15 18:17:38 2009
From: geri at thetwofacesofmoney.com (Geri Perry)
Date: Sun, 15 Mar 2009 17:17:38 -0500
Subject: [CitizensTruth] AIs lex Jones promoting armed insurection?
In-Reply-To: <616974.47436.qm@web30008.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
References: <616974.47436.qm@web30008.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <49BD7E82.1070600@thetwofacesofmoney.com>

HMMM,

interesting. And opposite what others have told me, although these 
others have also said they don't listen to Jones every day.

My I ask did you (or anyone else in cyberspace) use your "no" answer to 
the question as a reason NOT to watch the videos?

Just curious,

gerip

Edward Rynearson wrote:
> "Have you ever noticed that Alex Jones is continually warning about
> impending Armageddon in a manner which specifically encourages anger,
> extreme anxiety/agitation, and even armed revolution? "
>  
> No I haven't.
>  
> I listen to him every day and he tells people that resorting to 
> violence will play right into the hands of the globalists.   
>  
> What Alex has been warning against just heppened. 
>  
> Edward Rynearson
>  
>  
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> CitizensTruth mailing list
> CitizensTruth at six.pairlist.net
> http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/citizenstruth
> website: http://citizenstruth.info
>   

From welaware at merr.com  Sun Mar 15 18:25:59 2009
From: welaware at merr.com (Kris Knight)
Date: Sun, 15 Mar 2009 17:25:59 -0500
Subject: [CitizensTruth] Economist Michel Chossudovsky on America's
	fiscal collapse
In-Reply-To: <49BD7CC8.50301@thetwofacesofmoney.com>
References: <49BD7CC8.50301@thetwofacesofmoney.com>
Message-ID: <5A6B6FFD-3E98-42E5-A78F-47F5E03A8DCA@merr.com>

Any reports yet from areas where the economic hits have been hardest?   
What is actually happening on the ground at this point?
On Mar 15, 2009, at 5:10 PM, Geri Perry wrote:

> Interview by Bonnie Faulkner on Guns and Butter, one hour: http://kpfa.org/archive/id/49073
>
> Some notes:
>
> The numbers are astounding, and horrifying. . . .We 're in a very  
> serious situation - the most serious crisis in modern history.  
> Defense spending and the bank bailouts are eating up the totality of  
> Fed revenues, and exacerbate the crisis because the real truth is  
> that stimulus money is NOT going to the real economy. We're really  
> looking at a fiscal collapse, not a fiscal crisis, because virtually  
> every category of public expenditure is threatened.
>
> Worse, low interest rates (which notably do not apply to consumer  
> credit) means few will be purchasing U.S. debt in the form of  
> Treasury Bills and Bonds while at the same time low interest rates  
> encourage another speculative onslaught by the financial economy.  
> Treasury thus lacks the ability to finance its operations.
>
> Worse yet, the banks are not only the recipients of public money but  
> a big portion of the US debt is held by the banks, allowing the  
> banks to dictate policy - and basically control EVERYTHING. The  
> public money going to the banks is being used by the banks to buy up  
> public assets (and speculate with derivatives).
>
> This means State and local taxes will skyrocket. Meanwhile the  
> upward transfer of wealth to the financial economy will further gut  
> the real economy due to speculative activity. The FEMA camps being  
> built around the country specifically ties in to anticipated unrest.
>
> The people who control the government and the people who support the  
> government know very well what they have to do to control dissent.  
> One is to control the media, including the alternative media, so  
> that the public is completely unaware of the pending impoverishment  
> of the entire nation. (and since we have a global economy this  
> impoverishment extends to nations around the world, China's economy  
> is collapsing now. 3rd world countries already impoverished by IMF  
> structural adjustment loans will suffer most, and the collapse of  
> their economies will literally drive even greater numbers into death  
> by starvation)
> <END OF NOTES>
>
> In short, the system is rigged. Read about the first global crash of  
> 1345 to find out what may be in store: http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_91-96/954_Gallagher_Venice_rig.html
>
> Also WATCH FOR another email titled The World According to  
> Derivatives which is about my 7 part series on derivatives which  
> explains the whole picture.
>
> THE SOLUTION? Demand Congress get behind Kucinich to create  
> Constitutional money and regulate the value thereof.
> _______________________________________________
> CitizensTruth mailing list
> CitizensTruth at six.pairlist.net
> http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/citizenstruth
> website: http://citizenstruth.info

Kris Knight of WellAware Life Enhancement Center
Phone:  1-608-ALL-LIFE
welaware at merr.com







From geri at thetwofacesofmoney.com  Tue Mar 17 19:30:35 2009
From: geri at thetwofacesofmoney.com (Geri Perry)
Date: Tue, 17 Mar 2009 18:30:35 -0500
Subject: [CitizensTruth] The World According to Derivatives
Message-ID: <49C0329B.8090908@thetwofacesofmoney.com>

By yours truly, for your reading pleasure:

7 part series of articles under the umbrella title "The World According 
to Derivatives". Getting some very good reviews if my email is any 
indication.

The latest version is posted at 
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/cat_index_22.shtml and an 
earlier version at http://www.dissidentvoice.org/about/

Part 1: Irrational Exhuberance Creates Global Mayhem and Mountains of 
Taxpayer Debt
Part 2: A Faustian Bargain
Part 3: The global Casino, Currency Devaluation, and Giant Fire Sales
Part 4: History Repeats as the Off-balance Sheet Money Supply Explodes, 
Then Contracts
Part 5: The Dark Side of Global Credit System Redesign
Part 6: Den of Thieves, House of Cards
Part 7: The Place Where Industry, the Military and Government Converge


From garyfranchi at gmail.com  Tue Mar 17 21:52:39 2009
From: garyfranchi at gmail.com (Gary Franchi)
Date: Tue, 17 Mar 2009 19:52:39 -0600
Subject: [CitizensTruth] Franchi Slams New Police State Measures on CLTV
Message-ID: <2c9e41bb0903171852r5663bfe0nb06ffacbf2890ee9@mail.gmail.com>

Hey there, turn on CLTV news in 10 minutes for the rebroadcast of Gerard
McClendon LIVE! If you miss it, it will be rebroadcast again... and I'll be
putting out an edited youtube of it in a day or so.

We talked about the new Red Light camera technology that will soon be
checking "your papers" for insurance as you drive through the light.

It was a blast... and it looks like they may have me back.

-Gary
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From aqmstaffo at mailbag.com  Fri Mar 20 12:42:23 2009
From: aqmstaffo at mailbag.com (Daniel Stafford)
Date: Fri, 20 Mar 2009 11:42:23 -0500
Subject: [CitizensTruth] Citizen's Utility Board Presentation Last
	Night...
In-Reply-To: <1689786674-1237559732-cardhu_decombobulator_blackberry.rim.net-1320730183-@bxe1059.bisx.prod.on.blackberry>
References: <1689786674-1237559732-cardhu_decombobulator_blackberry.rim.net-1320730183-@bxe1059.bisx.prod.on.blackberry>
Message-ID: <49C3C76F.5030407@mailbag.com>



Dan Stafford wrote:
> Celia & Rebecca of the Illinois Citizen's Utility Board <http://www.citizensutilityboard.org/> came out to the suburbs to give a presentation on CUB <http://www.citizensutilityboard.org/> activities & programs, as well as energy efficiency measures last night.
>
> A little background: I'm one of the two Co-Chairs of the Progressive Democrats of Illinois. ( www.illinoisprogressives.org <http://www.illinoisprogressives.org> ) I've held this position since 2005. CUB <http://www.citizensutilityboard.org/> offered via e-mail to do a presentation at one of our monthly meetings, and I gladly accepted.
>
>  *It should be noted that CUB <http://www.citizensutilityboard.org/> is a non-partisan organization*
>
> The presentation given covered such topics as: CUB <http://www.citizensutilityboard.org/> mediation services in utility billing disputes, telephone billing analysis and plan comparison assistance for both cell and landline services, the new IL law on net metering for home renewable power systems, federal and state credits and rebates for the installation of high-efficiency appliances and renewable energy systems, upcoming smart grid technologies and remote utility management programs for air conditioning systems, demand-rate billing programs, and home electronics power-management. There was more, and several hand-outs outlining these programs.
>
> Additionally, CUB <http://www.citizensutilityboard.org/> advised us that Illinois has adopted a Renwable Portfolio Standard of 10% by 2010, and 25% by 2025, and is moving to match CAFE standards in California for new vehicle sales in Illinois.
>
> Highly impressive was the removal of system price caps on federal and state tax credits for renewable energy installations such as wind & solar. 
>
> All in all, energy and consumer-oriented policies in Illinois are growing up to face a new standard of fairness and sustainability. There is still much more to be done, but these programs represent a great leap forward.
>
> My heartfelt thanks goes out to CUB <http://www.citizensutilityboard.org/> and especially to Celia and Rebecca for making the trip out to spend the evening with us.
>
> Dan Stafford
>
>
> Words are the mind's bridge - its connection to all the universe.
> Love is the heart's bridge - its connection to all other souls.
> Loving words can work miracles.
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From futurenotwritten at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 20 13:11:54 2009
From: futurenotwritten at yahoo.com (Jay Becker)
Date: Fri, 20 Mar 2009 10:11:54 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [CitizensTruth] NYT coverage of 6th Anniversary protest
Message-ID: <501555.79471.qm@web33507.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

N.Y. / REGION ? | March 19, 2009 

City Room: A Day of Protests, Against Iraq War and A.I.G. 

By Jennifer Mascia and Jason Grant 

Despite a new president, protesters assailed the United States' continued involvement in Iraq.=2
0Others assailed the bonuses awarded by A.I.G. to executives. 

    Stop thinking like an American, 
Start thinking about humanity!



      
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From Walterb306 at cs.com  Sat Mar 21 12:13:26 2009
From: Walterb306 at cs.com (Walterb306 at cs.com)
Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2009 12:13:26 EDT
Subject: [CitizensTruth] ARTICLE- Martial Law
Message-ID: <ccb.4655ab32.36f66c26@cs.com>

All,

FYI.

Future is not carved in stone.  But we need to put oomph into the directions 
we want the nation to take.

Info may be the first step, but we need to be united and organized and in 
gear.  There is a lot of organizing going on all around the Chicago area and many 
opportunities to help.  Urge all of us to do as much as we can.

To paraphrase a good quote:  We can't do everything, but what we can do, we 
must do.

Peace

Beverley



http://www.rutherford.org/articles_db/commentary.asp?record_id=581

During his two terms in office, George W. Bush stepped outside the boundaries 
of the Constitution and assembled an amazing toolbox of powers that greatly 
increased the authority of the Executive branch and the reach of the federal 
government.

Bush expanded presidential power to, among other things, allow government 
agents to secretly open the private mail of American citizens; authorize 
government agents to secretly, and illegally, listen in on the phone calls of American 
citizens and read our e-mails; assume control of the federal government 
following a "catastrophic event"; and declare martial law.

Thus, the groundwork was laid for an imperial presidency and a potentially 
totalitarian government--a state of affairs that has not ended with Barack 
Obama's ascension to the Oval Office, despite hopes to the contrary that President 
Obama would fully restore the balance between government and its citizens to a 
pre-Bush status quo. As Charlie Savage reports in the New York Times, "Signs 
suggest that the administration's changes may turn out to be less sweeping 
than many had hoped or feared--prompting growing worry among civil liberties 
groups and a sense of vindication among supporters of Bush-era policies."

The fact is that the problem is bigger than Obama or any individual who 
occupies the White House. Indeed, once the government assumes expansive powers and 
crosses certain constitutional lines, it's almost impossible to pull back.

Continued at 
http://www.rutherford.org/articles_db/commentary.asp?record_id=581




 
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From edward_rynearson at yahoo.com  Sat Mar 21 23:31:15 2009
From: edward_rynearson at yahoo.com (Edward Rynearson)
Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2009 20:31:15 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [CitizensTruth] Jim Marrs on the Alex Jones Show - March 20,
	2009 (audio)
Message-ID: <696382.67573.qm@web30004.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

Jim Marrs on the Alex Jones show today - March 20, 2009 - 45:00 7MB http://www.radiodujour.com/mp3/20090320_alexjones_jimmarrs.mp3
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From Walterb306 at cs.com  Sat Mar 21 23:47:53 2009
From: Walterb306 at cs.com (Walterb306 at cs.com)
Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2009 23:47:53 EDT
Subject: [CitizensTruth] ARTICLE - Camps
Message-ID: <c55.4476a455.36f70ee9@cs.com>

All,

FYI.

Beverley

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12793


Preparing for Civil Unrest in America Legislation to Establish Internment 
Camps on US Military Bases 
by Michel Chossudovsky 


The Economic and Social Crisis

The financial meltdown has unleashed a latent and emergent social crisis 
across the United States.?
What is at stake is the fraudulent confiscation of lifelong savings and 
pension funds, the appropriation of tax revenues to finance the trillion dollar 
"bank bailouts", which ultimately serve to line the pockets of the richest people 
in America.???
This economic crisis is in large part the result of financial manipulation 
and outright fraud to the detriment of entire populations, leading to a renewed 
wave of corporate bankruptcies, mass unemployment and?poverty.?
The criminalization of the global financial system, characterized by a 
"Shadow Banking"?network has resulted in the centralization of bank power and an 
unprecedented concentration of private wealth.?
Obama's "economic stimulus" package and budget proposals contribute to a 
further process of concentration and centralization of bank power, the cumulative 
effects of which will eventually resul?in large scale corporate, bankruptcies, 
a new wave of foreclosures not to mention fiscal collapse and the downfall of 
State social programs. (For further details see Michel Chossudovsky, 
America's Fiscal Collapse, Global Research, March 2, 2009).?
The cumulative decline of real economic activity backlashes on employment and 
wages, which in turn leads to a collapse in purchaisng power.?The proposed 
"solution" under the Obama administration contributes to exacerbating rather 
than alleviating social inequalities and the process of wealth concentration.?
The Protest Movement
When people across America, whose lives have been shattered and destroyed, 
come to realize the true face of the global "free market" system, the legitimacy 
of? Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and the US administration will be 
challenged.?
A latent protest movement directed against the seat of economic and political 
power is unfolding.?
How this process will occur is hard to predict. All sectors of American 
society are potentially affected: wage earners, small, medium and even large 
businesses, farmers, professionals, federal, State and municipal employees, 
students, teachers, health workers, and unemployed. Protests will initially emerge 
from these various sectors. There is, however, at this stage, no organized 
national resistance movement directed against the administration's economic and 
financial agenda.???
Obama's populist rhetoric conceals the true nature of macro-economic policy. 
Acting on behalf of Wall Street, the administration's economic package, which 
includes close to a trillion dollar "aid" package for the financial services 
industry, coupled with massive austerity measures,? contributes to 
precipitating America into a bottomless crisis.
"Orwellian Solution" to the Great Depression: Curbing Civil Unrest
At this particular juncture, there is no economic recovery program in sight. 
The Washington-Wall Street consensus prevails. There are no policies, no 
alternatives formulated from within the political and economic system. .?
What is the way out? How will the US government face an impending social 
catastrophe?
The solution is to curb social unrest. The chosen avenue, inherited from the 
outgoing Bush administration is the reinforcement of? the Homeland 
Security?apparatus and the militarization of civilian State institutions.?
The outgoing administration has laid the groundwork. Various pieces of 
"anti-terrorist" legislation (including the Patriot Acts) and presidential 
directives have been put in place since 2001, largely using the pretext of the "Global 
War on Terrorism."?
Homeland Security's Internment Camps
Directly related to the issue of curbing social unrest, cohesive system of 
detention camps is also envisaged, under the jurisdiction of the Department of 
Homeland Security and the Pentagon.?
A bill entitled the National Emergency Centers Establishment Act (HR 645) was 
introduced in the US Congress in January. It calls for the establishment of 
six national emergency centers in major regions in the US to be located on 
existing military installations. 
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h111-645?
The stated purpose of? the "national emergency centers" is to provide 
"temporary housing, medical, and humanitarian assistance to individuals and families 
dislocated due to an emergency or major disaster." In actuality, what we are 
dealing with are FEMA internment camps. HR 645 states that the camps can be 
used to "meet other appropriate needs, as determined by the Secretary of Homeland 
Security."
There has been virtually no press coverage of HR 645.?
These "civilian facilities" on US military bases are to be established in 
cooperation with the US Military.?Modeled on Guantanamo, what we are dealing with 
is the militarization of FEMA internment facilities.?
Once a person is arrested and interned in a FEMA camp located on a military 
base, that person would in all likelihood, under a national emergency, fall 
under the de facto jurisdiction of the Military: civilian justice and law 
enforcement including habeas corpus would no longer apply.??
HR 645 bears a direct relationship to the economic crisis and the likelihood 
of mass protests across America. It constitutes a further move to militarize 
civilian law enforcement, repealing the Posse Comitatus Act.?
In the words of? Rep. Ron Paul:?
"...the fusion centers, militarized police, surveillance cameras and a 
domestic military command is not enough... Even though we know that detention 
facilities are already in place, they now want to legalize the construction of FEMA 
camps on military installations using the ever popular excuse that the 
facilities are for the purposes of a national emergency. With the phony debt-based 
economy getting worse and worse by the day, the possibility of civil unrest is 
becoming a greater threat to the establishment. One need only look at Iceland, 
Greece and other nations for what might happen in the United States next." 
(Daily Paul, September 2008, emphasis added)
The proposed internment camps should be seen in relation to the broader 
process of militarization of civilian institutions. The construction of internment 
camps predates the introduction of HR 645 (Establishment of Emergency Centers) 
in January 2009. There are, according to various (unconfirmed) reports, some 
800 FEMA prison camps in different regions of the U.S.?Moreover, since the 
1980s, the US military has developed "tactics, techniques and procedures" to 
suppress civilian dissent, to be used in the eventuality of mass protests (United 
States Army Field Manual 19-15 under Operation Garden Plot, entitled "Civil 
Disturbances" was issued in 1985)?

In early 2006, tax revenues were allocated to building modern internment camp 
facilities. In January 2006,? Kellogg Brown and Roots, which at the time was 
a subsidiary of? Halliburton, received a $385 million contract from the 
Department of Homeland Security's? Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE):?
"The contract, which is effective immediately [January 2006], provides for 
establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing 
ICE Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) Program facilities in the event of 
an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid 
development of new programs...?
The contract may also provide migrant detention support to other U.S. 
Government organizations in the event of an immigration emergency, as well as the 
development of a plan to react to a national emergency, such as a natural 
disaster. (KBR, 24 January 2006, emphasis added)
The stated objectives of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are 
to:
"protect national security and uphold public safety by targeting criminal 
networks and terrorist organizations that seek to exploit vulnerabilities in our 
immigration system, in our financial networks, along our border, at federal 
facilities and elsewhere in order to do harm to the United States. The end 
result is a safer, more secure America" (ICE homepage)
The US media is mum on the issue of the internment camps on US soil. While 
casually acknowledging the multimillion dollar contract granted to Halliburton's 
subsidiary, the news reports largely focused their attention on possible 
"cost overruns" (similar to those which occurred with KBR in Iraq).?
What is the political intent and purpose of these camps? The potential use of 
these internment facilities to detain American citizens under a martial law 
situation are not an object of media debate or discussion.?
Combat Units Assigned to the Homeland
In the last months of the Bush administration, prior to the November 2008 
presidential elections, the Department of Defense ordered the recall of the 3rd 
Infantry?s 1st Brigade Combat Team from Iraq. The relocation of a combat unit 
from the war theater to domestic front is an integral part of the Homeland 
Security agenda. The BCT was assigned to assist in law enforcement activities 
within the US.?
The BCT combat unit was attached to US Army North, the Army's component of US 
Northern Command (USNORTHCOM). The 1st BCT and other combat units would be 
called upon to perform specific military functions in the case of civil unrest:?
The 1st BCT?s soldiers also will learn how to use "the first ever nonlethal 
package that the Army has fielded," 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, 
referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons 
designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.(
(See Gina Cavallaro,? Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1, Army Times, 
September 8, 2008).?
Under the proposed withdrawal of US forces from Iraq under the Obama 
administration, one expects that other combat units will be brought home from the war 
theater and reassigned in the United States.?
The evolving national security scenario is characterized by a mesh of 
civilian and military institutions:?
-Army combat units working with civilian law enforcement, with the stated 
mission to curb "social unrest".?
- the establishment of new internment camps under civilian jurisdiction 
located on US military facilities.??
The FEMA internment camps are part of the Continuity of Government (COG), 
which would be put in place in the case of martial law.?
The internment camps are intended to "protect the government" against its 
citizens, by locking up protesters as well as political activists who might 
challenge the legitimacy of the Administration's national security, economic or 
military agenda.??
Spying on Americans: The Big Brother Data Bank
Related to the issue of internment and mass protests, how will data on 
American citizens be collected??
How will individuals across America be categorized??
What are the criteria of the Department of Homeland Security??
In? a 2004 report of the Homeland Security Council entitled Planning 
Scenarios, pertaining to the defense of the Homeland, the following categories of 
potential "conspirators" were identified: ?
?"foreign [Islamic] terrorists" ,
"domestic radical groups", [antiwar and civil rights groups]
"state sponsored adversaries" ["rogue states", "unstable nations"]
"disgruntled employees" [labor and union activists].
In June of last year, the Bush administration issued a National Security 
Presidential Directive (NSPD 59- HSPD 24) entitled Biometrics for Identification 
and Screening to Enhance National Security?(For Further details see Michel 
Chossudovsky, "Big Brother" Presidential Directive: "Biometrics for Identification 
and Screening to Enhance National Security", Global Research, June 2008)
Adopted without public debate or Congressional approval, its relevant 
?procedures are far-reaching. They are related to the issue of civil unrest. They are 
also part of the logic behind the establishment of FEMA internment camps 
under HR 645. .
?
NSPD 59 (Biometrics for Identification and Screening to Enhance National 
Security) goes far beyond the narrow issue of biometric identification, it 
recommends the collection and storage of "associated biographic" information, meaning 
information on the private lives of US citizens,?in minute detail, all of 
which will be "accomplished within the law":
"The contextual data that accompanies biometric data includes information on 
date and place of birth, citizenship, current address and address history, 
current employment and employment history, current phone numbers and phone number 
history, use of government services and tax filings. Other contextual data 
may include bank account and credit card histories, plus criminal database 
records on a local, state and federal level. The database also could include legal 
judgments or other public records documenting involvement in legal disputes, 
child custody records and marriage or divorce records."(#HYPERLINK 
"http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=66795"See Jerome Corsi, June 2008)
The directive uses 9/11 and the "Global War on Terrorism" as an all 
encompassing justification to wage a witch hunt against dissenting citizens, 
establishing at the same time an atmosphere of fear and intimidation across the land.

It also calls for the integration of various data banks as well as 
inter-agency cooperation in the sharing of information, with a view to eventually 
centralizing the information on American citizens.

In a carefully worded text, NSPD 59 "establishes a framework" to enable the 
Federal government and its various police and intelligence agencies to: ?
"use mutually compatible methods and procedures in the collection, storage, 
use, analysis, and sharing of biometric and associated biographic and 
contextual information of individuals in a lawful?and appropriate manner, while 
respecting their information privacy and other legal rights under United?States law."
The NSPD 59 Directive recommends:? "actions and associated timelines for 
enhancing the existing terrorist-oriented identification and screening processes 
by expanding the use of biometrics".
The procedures under NSPD 59 are consistent with an earlier June 2005 
decision which consisted in creating a "domestic spy service", under the auspices of 
the FBI.? (For further details see Michel Chossudovsky, Bush Administration 
creates "Secret State Police", June 30, 2005)
Working hand in glove with Homeland Security (DHS), the proposed "domestic 
intelligence department" would combine FBI counterterrorism, intelligence and 
espionage operations into a single service.?
The new department operating under the auspices of the FBI would have the 
authority to "seize the property of people deemed to be helping the spread of 
WMD": They would be able to "spy on people in America suspected of terrorism or 
having critical intelligence information, even if they are not suspected of 
committing a crime." (NBC Tonight, 29 June 2005).\


ANNEX
Text of H.R. 645: National Emergency Centers Establishment Act
This version: Introduced in House. 

This is the original text of the bill as it was written by its sponsor and 
submitted to the House for consideration. This is the latest version of the bill 
available on this website.

[SOURCE: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h111-645]


HR 645 IH
111th CONGRESS
1st Session
H. R. 645
To direct the Secretary of Homeland Security to establish national emergency 
centers on military installations.
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
January 22, 2009
Mr. HASTINGS of Florida introduced the following bill; which was referred to 
the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, and in addition to the 
Committee on Armed Services, for a period to be subsequently determined by the 
Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the 
jurisdiction of the committee concerned

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
A BILL
To direct the Secretary of Homeland Security to establish national emergency 
centers on military installations.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States 
of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the ?National Emergency Centers Establishment Act?.
SEC. 2. ESTABLISHMENT OF NATIONAL EMERGENCY CENTERS.
(a) In General- In accordance with the requirements of this Act, the 
Secretary of Homeland Security shall establish not fewer than 6 national emergency 
centers on military installations.
(b) Purpose of National Emergency Centers- The purpose of a national 
emergency center shall be to use existing infrastructure--
(1) to provide temporary housing, medical, and humanitarian assistance to 
individuals and families dislocated due to an emergency or major disaster;
(2) to provide centralized locations for the purposes of training and 
ensuring the coordination of Federal, State, and local first responders;
(3) to provide centralized locations to improve the coordination of 
preparedness, response, and recovery efforts of government, private, and not-for-profit 
entities and faith-based organizations; and
(4) to meet other appropriate needs, as determined by the Secretary of 
Homeland Security.
SEC. 3. DESIGNATION OF MILITARY INSTALLATIONS AS NATIONAL EMERGENCY CENTERS.
(a) In General- Not later than 60 days after the date of the enactment of 
this Act, the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Secretary 
of Defense, shall designate not fewer than 6 military installations as sites 
for the establishment of national emergency centers.
(b) Minimum Requirements- A site designated as a national emergency center 
shall be--
(1) capable of meeting for an extended period of time the housing, health, 
transportation, education, public works, humanitarian and other transition needs 
of a large number of individuals affected by an emergency or major disaster;
(2) environmentally safe and shall not pose a health risk to individuals who 
may use the center;
(3) capable of being scaled up or down to accommodate major disaster 
preparedness and response drills, operations, and procedures;
(4) capable of housing existing permanent structures necessary to meet 
training and first responders coordination requirements during nondisaster periods;
(5) capable of hosting the infrastructure necessary to rapidly adjust to 
temporary housing, medical, and humanitarian assistance needs;
(6) required to consist of a complete operations command center, including 2 
state-of-the art command and control centers that will comprise a 24/7 
operations watch center as follows:
(A) one of the command and control centers shall be in full ready mode; and
(B) the other shall be used daily for training; and
(7) easily accessible at all times and be able to facilitate handicapped and 
medical facilities, including during an emergency or major disaster.
(c) Location of National Emergency Centers- There shall be established not 
fewer than one national emergency center in each of the following areas:
(1) The area consisting of Federal Emergency Management Agency Regions I, II, 
and III.
(2) The area consisting of Federal Emergency Management Agency Region IV.
(3) The area consisting of Federal Emergency Management Agency Regions V and 
VII.
(4) The area consisting of Federal Emergency Management Agency Region VI.
(5) The area consisting of Federal Emergency Management Agency Regions VIII 
and X.
(6) The area consisting of Federal Emergency Management Agency Region IX.
(d) Preference for Designation of Closed Military Installations- Wherever 
possible, the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Secretary 
of Defense, shall designate a closed military installation as a site for a 
national emergency center. If the Secretaries of Homeland Security and Defense 
jointly determine that there is not a sufficient number of closed military 
installations that meet the requirements of subsections (b) and (c), the 
Secretaries shall jointly designate portions of existing military installations other 
than closed military installations as national emergency centers.
(e) Transfer of Control of Closed Military Installations- If a closed 
military installation is designated as a national emergency center, not later than 
180 days after the date of designation, the Secretary of Defense shall transfer 
to the Secretary of Homeland Security administrative jurisdiction over such 
closed military installation.
(f) Cooperative Agreement for Joint Use of Existing Military Installations- 
If an existing military installation other than a closed military installation 
is designated as a national emergency center, not later than 180 days after 
the date of designation, the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Secretary of 
Defense shall enter into a cooperative agreement to provide for the 
establishment of the national emergency center.
(g) Reports-
(1) PRELIMINARY REPORT- Not later than 90 days after the date of the 
enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Homeland Security, acting jointly with the 
Secretary of Defense, shall submit to Congress a report that contains for each 
designated site--
(A) an outline of the reasons why the site was selected;
(B) an outline of the need to construct, repair, or update any existing 
infrastructure at the site;
(C) an outline of the need to conduct any necessary environmental clean-up at 
the site;
(D) an outline of preliminary plans for the transfer of control of the site 
from the Secretary of Defense to the Secretary of Homeland Security, if 
necessary under subsection (e); and
(E) an outline of preliminary plans for entering into a cooperative agreement 
for the establishment of a national emergency center at the site, if 
necessary under subsection (f).
(2) UPDATE REPORT- Not later than 120 days after the date of the enactment of 
this Act, the Secretary of Homeland Security, acting jointly with the 
Secretary of Defense, shall submit to Congress a report that contains for each 
designated site--
(A) an update on the information contained in the report as required by 
paragraph (1);
(B) an outline of the progress made toward the transfer of control of the 
site, if necessary under subsection (e);
(C) an outline of the progress made toward entering a cooperative agreement 
for the establishment of a national emergency center at the site, if necessary 
under subsection (f); and
(D) recommendations regarding any authorizations and appropriations that may 
be necessary to provide for the establishment of a national emergency center 
at the site.
(3) FINAL REPORT- Not later than 1 year after the date of the enactment of 
this Act, the Secretary of Homeland Security, acting jointly with the Secretary 
of Defense, shall submit to Congress a report that contains for each 
designated site--
(A) finalized information detailing the transfer of control of the site, if 
necessary under subsection (e);
(B) the finalized cooperative agreement for the establishment of a national 
emergency center at the site, if necessary under subsection (f); and
(C) any additional information pertinent to the establishment of a national 
emergency center at the site.
(4) ADDITIONAL REPORTS- The Secretary of Homeland Security, acting jointly 
with the Secretary of Defense, may submit to Congress additional reports as 
necessary to provide updates on steps being taken to meet the requirements of this 
Act.
SEC. 4. LIMITATIONS ON STATUTORY CONSTRUCTION.
This Act does not affect--
(1) the authority of the Federal Government to provide emergency or major 
disaster assistance or to implement any disaster mitigation and response program, 
including any program authorized by the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief 
and Emergency Assistance Act (42 U.S.C. 5121 et seq.); or
(2) the authority of a State or local government to respond to an emergency.
SEC. 5. AUTHORIZATION OF APPROPRIATIONS.
There is authorized to be appropriated $180,000,000 for each of fiscal years 
2009 and 2010 to carry out this Act. Such funds shall remain available until 
expended.
SEC. 6. DEFINITIONS.
In this Act, the following definitions apply:
(1) CLOSED MILITARY INSTALLATION- The term ?closed military installation? 
means a military installation, or portion thereof, approved for closure or 
realignment under the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Act of 1990 (part A of 
title XXIX of Public Law 101-510; 10 U.S.C. 2687 note) that meet all, or 2 out 
of the 3 following requirements:
(A) Is located in close proximity to a transportation corridor.
(B) Is located in a State with a high level or threat of disaster related 
activities.
(C) Is located near a major metropolitan center.
(2) EMERGENCY- The term ?emergency? has the meaning given such term in 
section 102 of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act 
(42 U.S.C. 5122).
(3) MAJOR DISASTER- The term ?major disaster? has the meaning given such 
term in section 102 of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency 
Assistance Act (42 U.S.C. 5122).
(4) MILITARY INSTALLATION- The term ?military installation? has the meaning 
given such term in section 2910 of the Defense Base Closure and Realignment 
Act of 1990 (part A of title XXIX of Public Law 101-510; 10 U.S.C. 2687 note).
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From aqmstaffo at mailbag.com  Sun Mar 22 19:53:18 2009
From: aqmstaffo at mailbag.com (Daniel Stafford)
Date: Sun, 22 Mar 2009 18:53:18 -0500
Subject: [CitizensTruth] World March for Peace and Nonviolence
In-Reply-To: <a0623090ec5ec4ed805c4@[24.231.1.35]>
References: <a0623090ec5ec4ed805c4@[24.231.1.35]>
Message-ID: <49C6CF6E.1070506@mailbag.com>



Jean Hudon wrote:
> Dear Meria
>
> What a truly wonderful initiative!! Thanks a LOT for bringing this to 
> my attention. I'm sending in a separate email the endorsement form and 
> heartily support this on behalf of the Earth Rainbow Network. I'm also 
> going to network the following on this in my next compilation 
> (reaching over 3100+ subscribers worldwide - you included - and I'm 
> glad to see you are still on it Meria!) and will also send it 
> separately to the Planetary Awakening Network list as well as to the 
> Focus Group list so as to reach the maximum number of people. And I'm 
> immediately Bccing this to some individuals who may help bring more 
> attention to this most excellent and timely initiative.
>
> If there is anything else I can do, feel free to ask and please do 
> send me all future updates related to this World March for Peace and 
> Nonviolence so I may continue to keep everyone updated on this.
>
> Also if you see from time to time other material which you feel I 
> should network in my compilations, please feel free to send it to me - 
> as a separate post if you can please not through adding me to your 
> regular e-list as I'm as always swamped with far too many emails to 
> process and stuff to do than I materially have time to do. ;-)
>
> I send a big hug your way Meria ......
>
> Jean
>
> ---
>
> A WONDERFUL PEACE INITIATIVE WE ALL NEED TO FULLY GET BEHIND!
>
> Date: 21 Mar 2009
> From: Meria (meria at globalstrategyofnonviolence.org)
> Subject: World March for Peace and Nonviolence Oct. 2, 2009 to Jan. 
> 02, 2010 - A Call for Global Unity
>
> ANNOUNCING - An incredible opportunity for world unity! 
> A new initiative was announced in December, 2008, called the WORLD 
> MARCH for Peace and Nonviolence (WM), by World Without Wars. The WM is 
> much more than a march.  It is an illustration of Global Unity and the 
> whole world is participating!  This is a request for an endorsement of 
> the WM.
>
> The WM is a three month global initiative designed to bring awareness 
> of the desire for nonviolence and to renounce war, disarm, de-nuke, 
> and stop violence.  The WM states that the people in each country will 
> exert "continuous pressure" to influence their own governments to 
> change their ways and lay down the sword.  Please see the links below.
>
> The WM is much more than just a march. The WM is:
>
> - A Movement illustrating "Unity"
> - A People Movement - A Reaching Out with the OLIVE BRANCH
> - A Method of Attaining "Critical Mass" and Creating "Political Clout."
>
> The world has an incredible opportunity.  President Obama has taken an 
> extraordinary step of diplomacy that can be utilized by the world, 
> given the right circumstances.  On January 27th, President Obama 
> announced to the Islamic countries that "Americans are not your 
> enemy."  What a beautiful reaching out with the Olive Branch. This is 
> a wonderful step, however, President Obama cannot change the world 
> alone.  He needs the people. The path the WM is paving could be 
> "extraordinary."  It will need a lot of support and a strong 
> follow-up!  This is a perfect time for "people" to stand up, speak 
> out, and reach out to others with the OLIVE BRANCH.  The key is 
> "education" and illustration of nonviolence, "For the Children."
>
> Please send me notification of your participation.  I look forward to 
> hearing from you.  Please tell your constituencies!
>
> Peace and Love,
> Meria Heller, Meria at GlobalStrategyofNonviolence.org
> meria at meria.net
> http://www.GSofNV.org
>
> "If a person with black hair sees a person with red hair, he or she 
> sees someone different, but, if a person with black hair sees a child 
> with red hair, he or she sees a child."
>
> - Adil Najam, Boston University, International Relations.
>        
> PROMO VIDEO (in Spanish with English subtitles) (*excellent)
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT1G7KWIOKo
>
> LAUNCH of WM VIDEO
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vshv3K9D--0
>
> U.S. site
> http://www.worldmarchusa.net/World_March_USA/Welcome.html
>
> Canada site
> http://www.worldmarch.ca/
>
> French site
> http://www.worldmarch.info
>
> ---
>
> Note from Jean: Look at this impressive list of selected American 
> individual endorsements of the World March for Peace & Nonviolence
> http://www.worldmarchusa.net/World_March_USA/US_Endorsements.html
>
> If you and/or your organization wish to also endorse this World March, 
> please email Meria <meria at globalstrategyofnonviolence.org> or Dennis 
> Redmond <info at worldmarchusa.net> and ask for their Endorsement Form. 
> I've endorsed it on behalf of the Earth Rainbow Network.
>
> Many individuals and organizations 
> <http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=fr&q=%22World+march+for+Peace+and+Nonviolence&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8> 
> are helping to promote this vital initiative. Here is how it was 
> presented in the quarterly newsletter called "Many to Many" published 
> by Operation Peace Through Unity 
> <http://www.peacethroughunity.info/manytomany.html> and whose current 
> issue is available HERE 
> <http://www.peacethroughunity.info/downloads/2009-v107-many_to_many-web.pdf>.
>
> *World march for Peace and Nonviolence - 2 October 2009 to 2 January 2010*
>                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
>
> The World March for Peace and Nonviolence will journey through 
> countries and territories of the Oceania and East Asia, Continental 
> Asia, Europe, Africa, America, and Antarctica. The March will be 
> officially launched in Wellington, New Zealand, on the 2nd of October 
> 2009, the anniversary of Gandhi's birthday, which was declared by the 
> UN as "The International Day of Non-Violence".* From there it will be 
> traveling for three month, passing through 'all climates and seasons, 
> from the hot summer of the tropics and the deserts, to the winter of 
> Siberia', and conclude in the Andes on the 2nd of January 2010 - the 
> last year of the decade, dedicated to a Culture of Peace and 
> Non-violence for the Children of the World.
>
> The March was initiated by the international organization "World 
> Without War", which explains that eliminating wars and violence will 
> mean "leaving human pre-history behind and taking a giant step forward 
> in the evolution of our species". The World March will be created and 
> shaped by every participant, and  is open to any person, organization, 
> collective group, political party, business etc. that share the same 
> vision and aspiration.
>
> Every city that the March visits will be preparing forums, meetings, 
> festivals, conferences and events, and in New Zealand different towns 
> and townships outside Wellington are already planning and preparing 
> their particular contributions to the international launch, which will 
> also be their response to the World Without War's clarion call: "Join 
> a multitude of others in sending a clear signal, and your voice will 
> have to be heard!"
> For further details and information on how you can participate see 
> http://www.marchamundial.org/
>
> * The International Day of Non-Violence was established in accordance 
> with GA resolution A/RES/61/271, 15 June 2007, as an occasion to 
> 'disseminate the message of non-violence, including through education 
> and public awareness'. The resolution reaffirms 'the universal 
> relevance of the principle of non-violence' and the desire 'to secure 
> a culture of peace, tolerance, understanding and non-violence'. 
> http://www.un.org/events/nonviolence/2008/
>
> ---
>
> Related initiatives:
>
> Global 
> Zero                                                                                                                                      
>
>
> The Global Zero initiative, launched in Paris in December 2008 by 100 
> political, military, business, faith and civic leaders from across 
> political lines, is in the process of developing a step by step policy 
> plan to reach the aim of zero nuclear weapons. Among the key steps in 
> this policy are:
>
> - deep reductions to Russian-U.S arsenals, which comprise 96 per cent 
> of the world's 27,000 nuclear weapons;
>
> - Russia and the United States, joined by other nuclear weapons 
> states, cutting arsenals to zero is phased and verified reductions;
>
> - Establishing verification systems and international management of 
> the fuel cycle to prevent future development of nuclear weapons.
>
> Global Zero is preparing for a World Summit in early 2010 through a 
> series of meetings and events, and is also inviting citizens and 
> leaders around the world, who are endorsing the goal of Global Zero, 
> to sign a Declaration with the following text:
>
> "WE, THE UNDERSIGNED, believe that to protect our children, our 
> grandchildren and our civilization from the threat of nuclear 
> catastrophe, we must eliminate all nuclear weapons globally. We 
> therefore commit to working for a legally binding verifiable 
> agreement, including all nations, to eliminate nuclear weapons by a 
> date certain."
>
> Please sign this declaration at 
> http://www.globalzero.org/en/sign-declaration
>
> ---
>
> The Asia-Pacific Freeze Campaign
>
> A Call for a Safer, Greener Future
>
> The aim of this campaign is to freeze and then reduce the military 
> spending of the United States, Japan, China, Russia, South Korea, and 
> North Korea. Accounting for more than 65 per cent of the global 
> military spending, these countries are also contributing to the 
> escalation in global military spending, which has increased by 45 per 
> cent over the last decade. The world's precious resources are being 
> wasted in preparing for war as the world is facing unprecedented 
> social, economic and climate crises. But without public pressure 
> governments are not likely to change their ways. The Asia-Pacific 
> Freeze would not only play an essential role in defusing tensions on 
> the Korean peninsula; by cooperating on reducing military spending, 
> these six countries could help turn Northeast Asia into a model of 
> peace and sustainable development.
>
> The campaign, coordinated by the Institute for Policy Studies (founded 
> in Washington 1963) on behalf of peace activists and scholars in the 
> above mentioned countries, is calling on people and groups to sign 
> their Call to Action, saying that "As individual countries and as an 
> international community, we have a choice. We can continue on a 
> dangerous path seeking ever-elusive "security" through military might. 
> Or we can choose to address the pressing problems facing us all - 
> global economic crisis, climate change, nuclear proliferation - by no 
> longer wasting our precious resources on preparations for war".
>
> The Call to Action and further information can be read at: 
> http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5852
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From dimension04 at sbcglobal.net  Tue Mar 24 02:40:25 2009
From: dimension04 at sbcglobal.net (Connie Smith)
Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 01:40:25 -0500
Subject: [CitizensTruth] 9/11 publication: the many False Flag ops
Message-ID: <2D9A888C131946A385473337023255D7@InspironConnie>





>From a 9/11 Brother in Britain:


----- Original Message ----- 
From: Ian Woods 
To: Ian Woods 
Sent: Friday, March 20, 2009 1:16 PM
Subject: Re: Looking for distributors for Global Outlook Issue 13 - To be released soon!


Dear Fellow 9/11 Truth Activists,

 

We are just about to publish the 13th and final issue of Global Outlook, (It's an expose of 26 notable False Flag Operations throughout history, including 9/11, plus a lot more!) and we are looking for potential distributors for this blockbuster issue (due to roll off the press sometime soon).

 

If you are interested in receiving a complimentary copy to see if you might be interested in getting a box of 25 or so copies (to sell on consignment), then please reply to this email with your correct mailing address before April 3rd. 

 

(The cover price will be $10.00 and it will contain around 240 pages of truth info for concerned citizens. The bulk price will be published on the order form near the end of the magazine when it comes out.)

 

Thank you,

 

Ian 

 

Ian Woods

Global Outlook 

www.GlobalOutlook.ca

 

P.S. Please forward this email to any others you feel might be interested in helping us distribute this issue, in Canada or in the States.
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From dimension04 at sbcglobal.net  Tue Mar 24 02:56:23 2009
From: dimension04 at sbcglobal.net (Connie Smith)
Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 01:56:23 -0500
Subject: [CitizensTruth] Oh, I guess Ian Woods is from Canada
Message-ID: <DE5724C3B4B747CF971A700755756861@InspironConnie>







not Britain -- my bad!

Connie
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From janice.matthews at gmail.com  Tue Mar 24 16:17:38 2009
From: janice.matthews at gmail.com (Janice Matthews)
Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:17:38 -0500
Subject: [CitizensTruth] Please help promote--
Message-ID: <49C93FE2.1010409@gmail.com>


*To All Readers: Help Force Congress To Observe the Law on National 
Emergencies!!! *
March 24, 2009
Peter Dale Scott and Dan Hamburg

http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20090324183053848

On 9/11 the Bush administration declared a State of Emergency (SOE), 
which was formally proclaimed on September 14, 2001, and extended by 
Bush repeatedly thereafter, most recently on August 28, 2008.^1 
<http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20090324183053848#1> Under 
cover of this SOE, Bush secretly enacted many extreme measures, ranging 
from suspension of habeas corpus to preparations for martial law in 
America; all these were undertaken as part of secret so-called 
"Continuity of Government" (COG) procedures associated with the SOE, and 
first instituted on 9/11.^2 
<http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20090324183053848#2> ^and ^3 
<http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20090324183053848#3>

The National Emergencies Act, one of the post-Watergate reforms so 
detested by Vice-President Cheney, requires specifically that

    Not later than six months after a national emergency is declared,
    and not later than the end of each six-month period thereafter that
    such emergency continues, each House of Congress shall meet to
    consider a vote on a joint resolution to determine whether that
    emergency shall be terminated.
    (50 U.S.C. 1622 (2002)^4
    <http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20090324183053848#4>

Last fall one of us appealed on the Internet for the Democrats in 
Congress to take this statutorily required step, and also to learn what 
secret COG measures were being enacted under the SOE.^5 
<http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20090324183053848#5> There 
was no response.

In February 2009 we sent to officials in Washington the following appeal 
to consider terminating the State of Emergency. The appeal was sent to 
President Obama's staff in the White House, and to the staff of Nancy 
Pelosi, Peter DeFazio, and Dennis Kucinich in Congress. Almost two 
months have passed, and there has not yet been any response from the 
addressees.

We are now appealing to the readers of this post to contact their 
representatives in Congress, and demand that they consider the 
termination of the State of Emergency, as is required of them by law.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

    *This is the letter sent February 10, 2009 by Peter Dale Scott and
    Dan Hamburg*:
    *Will Obama and Congress End the State of Emergency?*

    On September 11, 2001, the government declared a state of emergency.
    That state of emergency was formally put in writing^6
    <http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20090324183053848#6> on
    9/14/2001 consistent with Section 202(d) of the National Emergencies
    Act (50 U.S.C.).

    The state of emergency has continued in full force and effect from
    9/11/01 to the present. It was most recently extended on August 28,
    2008 for an additional year:

        *Notice: Continuation of the National Emergency with Respect to
        Certain Terrorist Attacks*

        Consistent with section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act
        (50 U.S.C.), I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency I
        declared on September 14, 2001, in Proclamation 7463, with
        respect to the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center, New
        York, New York, the Pentagon, and aboard United Airlines flight
        93, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks
        on the United States.

        Because the terrorist threat continues, the national emergency
        declared on September 14, 2001, and the powers and authorities
        adopted to deal with that emergency, must continue in effect
        beyond September 14, 2008. Therefore, I am continuing in effect
        for an additional year the national emergency I declared on
        September 14, 2001, with respect to the terrorist threat.

        This notice shall be published in the Federal Register and
        transmitted to the Congress.

        GEORGE W. BUSH
        THE WHITE HOUSE,
        August 28, 2008.

    Under a series of Presidential Decision Directives, the Bush
    administration enacted secret emergency powers, reportedly affecting
    the U.S. Constitution, which even the members of the House Homeland
    Security Committee have not been permitted to review.

    Congress has a statutory obligation to address this situation.
    Section 1622(b) of the National Emergencies Act states that: "Not
    later than six months after a national emergency is declared, and
    not later than the end of each six-month period thereafter that such
    emergency continues, each House of Congress shall meet to consider a
    vote on a joint resolution to determine whether that emergency shall
    be terminated."

    We now have a new President, supported by a new Congress, elected
    with a campaign promise of "Change." In this changed atmosphere, two
    questions need to be answered to satisfy the legitimate concerns of
    the American people:

        *Will President Obama allow the state of national emergency,
        first declared by President George W. Bush on 9/14/01 and
        re-declared seven times, to remain in effect?

        Will Congress meet their statutory responsibilities under
        Section 1622(b) of the National Emergencies Act, and meet to
        determine whether that emergency shall be terminated?*

    Dan Hamburg, former US Representative (CA-01)
    Peter Dale Scott, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Our appeal to readers:* Please contact your Representative and Senators 
(with a copy to the Homeland Security Committee Chairs (contact info 
below), utilizing this information and requesting a specific response to 
these two questions. You may also wish to follow up with a phone call to 
their offices, asking to speak with the staffer who can answer your 
questions about national emergencies. Submit responses you receive 
and/or answers to the questions you ask, to responses at 911truth.org for 
posting here. Please also post this appeal 
<http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20090324183053848#r7> to your 
websites, and forward to your email lists.

Congressman Bennie Thompson, Chairman
House Committee on Homeland Security
176 Ford House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
Phone: (202) 225-5876
Fax: (202) 225-5898
Committee Membership Roster 
<http://hsc.house.gov/SiteDocuments/memb111.pdf> (Is your Rep on this 
Committee?)

and
Senator Joseph Lieberman, Chairman
Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs
340 Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Phone: (202) 224-4041
Fax: (202) 224-9750
Committee membership roster 
<http://hsgac.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?Fuseaction=About.Membership>(Is 
your Senator on this Committee?)

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*ENDNOTES*

^1 <http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20090324183053848#r1> 
Continuation of the National Emergency with Respect to Certain Terrorist 
Attacks 
<http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2008/08/20080828-7.html>. 

^2 <http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20090324183053848#r2> 
Peter Dale Scott, /The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of 
America/ (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 
2007), 9-11, 183-87, 210-14, 233-42.
^3 <http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20090324183053848#r3> 
Investigation into Whether America is Still a Constitutional Government, 
www.constitutionally.blogspot.com <http://www.constitutionally.blogspot.com>
^4 <http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20090324183053848#r4> 
National Emergencies Act, (50 U.S.C. 1622 (2002)) 
<http://uscode.house.gov/download/pls/50C34.txt>
^5 <http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20090324183053848#r5>Peter 
Dale Scott, "Bush Extends 9/11 National Emergency Yet Again." Global 
Research, September 4, 2008, 
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10065 
<http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10065>.
^6 <http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20090324183053848#r6> 
Declaration of National Emergency by Reason Of Certain Terrorist Attacks 
<http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2008/08/20080828-7.html>.

More information on National Emergency Powers, from a Congressional 
Research Report last updated August 30, 2007, is available at 
OpenCRS.com <http://opencrs.com/document/98-505/2007-08-30>. A related 
CRS Report, /Martial Law and National Emergency/, is available at 
www.fas.org <http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/RS21024.pdf>
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From r.gillam at comcast.net  Wed Mar 25 21:55:14 2009
From: r.gillam at comcast.net (Ragen Gillam)
Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:55:14 -0500
Subject: [CitizensTruth] FW: Bailing out thieves
Message-ID: <20090326015532.B60D46F6B9@six.pairlist.net>

 

 

 

No one seems to notice that "capitalism" no longer means investing in plant
and equipment and jobs and making stuff to consume and export.  It means
speculating in real estate, commodities, and stock prices; buying companies
with debt dumped on the companies, then shrinking them; trapping people into
credit card debt, then raising the rates retroactively; and conning the poor
bewildered into taking out excessive mortgages and then selling the toxic
debt to the rich bewildered.

 

Milton Friedman is smiling in his grave; Adam Smith is spinning in his.

 

Fw frm

Art Hilgart
art at hilgart.us

 


The Big Takeover 


The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall
Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution 


MATT TAIBBI

Rolling Stone, Mar 19, 2009 

It's over ? we're officially, royally fucked. no empire can survive being
rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks
ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally
went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner
was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions
of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a
profound symbol of our national decline ? a corporation that got rich
insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's
heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street
card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in
the waning days of the British Empire.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest
quarterly loss in American corporate history ? some $61.7 billion. In the
final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million
every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American
household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened
at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically
chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent
stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch
and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the
end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of
companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to
spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last
year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).

So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome
comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about
it is that we're still in denial ? we still think this is some kind of
unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of
psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream.
When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that
poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck ? bad year for business,
you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the
company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: "The marketplace is
a pretty crummy place to be right now," he said. "When the world catches
pneumonia, we get it too." In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even
whined that AIG was being "consumed by the same issues that are driving
house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet's investment
portfolio down."

Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick
from being left out in someone else's financial weather. He conveniently
forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically
scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the
causes of its "pneumonia" was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion
bets with money it didn't have, in a toxic and completely unregulated
derivatives market.

Nor did anyone mention that when AIG finally got up from its seat at the
Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed money
all over town ? and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this
particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at
its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all casinos, one where
middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires.

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout,
but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide
economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of
revolution, a coup d'?tat. They cemented and formalized a political trend
that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the
government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control
elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de gr?ce: Given virtually free rein over the
economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then
cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up
their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end
up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the
Treasury and the Federal Reserve ? "our partners in the government," as
Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most
recent bailout.

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking
of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the
unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But
if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal
power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of
giant Enron ? a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing
insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense
of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as
taxpayers.

I. PATIENT ZERO

The best way to understand the financial crisis is to understand the
meltdown at AIG. AIG is what happens when short, bald managers of otherwise
boring financial bureaucracies start seeing Brad Pitt in the mirror. This is
a company that built a giant fortune across more than a century by betting
on safety-conscious policyholders ? people who wear seat belts and build
houses on high ground ? and then blew it all in a year or two by turning
their entire balance sheet over to a guy who acted like making huge bets
with other people's money would make his dick bigger.

That guy ? the Patient Zero of the global economic meltdown ? was one Joseph
Cassano, the head of a tiny, 400-person unit within the company called AIG
Financial Products, or AIGFP. Cassano, a pudgy, balding Brooklyn College
grad with beady eyes and way too much forehead, cut his teeth in the
Eighties working for Mike Milken, the granddaddy of modern Wall Street debt
alchemists. Milken, who pioneered the creative use of junk bonds, relied on
messianic genius and a whole array of insider schemes to evade detection
while wreaking financial disaster. Cassano, by contrast, was just a greedy
little turd with a knack for selective accounting who ran his scam right out
in the open, thanks to Washington's deregulation of the Wall Street casino.
"It's all about the regulatory environment," says a government source
involved with the AIG bailout. "These guys look for holes in the system, for
ways they can do trades without government interference. Whatever is
unregulated, all the action is going to pile into that."

The mess Cassano created had its roots in an investment boom fueled in part
by a relatively new type of financial instrument called a
collateralized-debt obligation. A CDO is like a box full of diced-up assets.
They can be anything: mortgages, corporate loans, aircraft loans,
credit-card loans, even other CDOs. So as X mortgage holder pays his bill,
and Y corporate debtor pays his bill, and Z credit-card debtor pays his
bill, money flows into the box.

The key idea behind a CDO is that there will always be at least some money
in the box, regardless of how dicey the individual assets inside it are. No
matter how you look at a single unemployed ex-con trying to pay the note on
a six-bedroom house, he looks like a bad investment. But dump his loan in a
box with a smorgasbord of auto loans, credit-card debt, corporate bonds and
other crap, and you can be reasonably sure that somebody is going to pay up.
Say $100 is supposed to come into the box every month. Even in an
apocalypse, when $90 in payments might default, you'll still get $10. What
the inventors of the CDO did is divide up the box into groups of investors
and put that $10 into its own level, or "tranche." They then convinced
ratings agencies like Moody's and S&P to give that top tranche the highest
AAA rating ? meaning it has close to zero credit risk.

Suddenly, thanks to this financial seal of approval, banks had a way to turn
their shittiest mortgages and other financial waste into investment-grade
paper and sell them to institutional investors like pensions and insurance
companies, which were forced by regulators to keep their portfolios as safe
as possible. Because CDOs offered higher rates of return than truly safe
products like Treasury bills, it was a win-win: Banks made a fortune selling
CDOs, and big investors made much more holding them.

The problem was, none of this was based on reality. "The banks knew they
were selling crap," says a London-based trader from one of the bailed-out
companies. To get AAA ratings, the CDOs relied not on their actual
underlying assets but on crazy mathematical formulas that the banks cooked
up to make the investments look safer than they really were. "They had some
back room somewhere where a bunch of Indian guys who'd been doing nothing
but math for God knows how many years would come up with some kind of model
saying that this or that combination of debtors would only default once
every 10,000 years," says one young trader who sold CDOs for a major
investment bank. "It was nuts."

Now that even the crappiest mortgages could be sold to conservative
investors, the CDOs spurred a massive explosion of irresponsible and
predatory lending. In fact, there was such a crush to underwrite CDOs that
it became hard to find enough subprime mortgages ? read: enough unemployed
meth dealers willing to buy million-dollar homes for no money down ? to fill
them all. As banks and investors of all kinds took on more and more in CDOs
and similar instruments, they needed some way to hedge their massive bets ?
some kind of insurance policy, in case the housing bubble burst and all that
debt went south at the same time. This was particularly true for investment
banks, many of which got stuck holding or "warehousing" CDOs when they wrote
more than they could sell. And that's were Joe Cassano came in.

Known for his boldness and arrogance, Cassano took over as chief of AIGFP in
2001. He was the favorite of Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, the head of AIG, who
admired the younger man's hard-driving ways, even if neither he nor his
successors fully understood exactly what it was that Cassano did. According
to a source familiar with AIG's internal operations, Cassano basically told
senior management, "You know insurance, I know investments, so you do what
you do, and I'll do what I do ? leave me alone." Given a free hand within
the company, Cassano set out from his offices in London to sell a lucrative
form of "insurance" to all those investors holding lots of CDOs. His tool of
choice was another new financial instrument known as a credit-default swap,
or CDS.

The CDS was popularized by J.P. Morgan, in particular by a group of young,
creative bankers who would later become known as the "Morgan Mafia," as many
of them would go on to assume influential positions in the finance world. In
1994, in between booze and games of tennis at a resort in Boca Raton,
Florida, the Morgan gang plotted a way to help boost the bank's returns. One
of their goals was to find a way to lend more money, while working around
regulations that required them to keep a set amount of cash in reserve to
back those loans. What they came up with was an early version of the
credit-default swap.

In its simplest form, a CDS is just a bet on an outcome. Say Bank A writes a
million-dollar mortgage to the Pope for a town house in the West Village.
Bank A wants to hedge its mortgage risk in case the Pope can't make his
monthly payments, so it buys CDS protection from Bank B, wherein it agrees
to pay Bank B a premium of $1,000 a month for five years. In return, Bank B
agrees to pay Bank A the full million-dollar value of the Pope's mortgage if
he defaults. In theory, Bank A is covered if the Pope goes on a meth binge
and loses his job.

When Morgan presented their plans for credit swaps to regulators in the late
Nineties, they argued that if they bought CDS protection for enough of the
investments in their portfolio, they had effectively moved the risk off
their books. Therefore, they argued, they should be allowed to lend more,
without keeping more cash in reserve. A whole host of regulators ? from the
Federal Reserve to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency ? accepted
the argument, and Morgan was allowed to put more money on the street.

What Cassano did was to transform the credit swaps that Morgan popularized
into the world's largest bet on the housing boom. In theory, at least,
there's nothing wrong with buying a CDS to insure your investments.
Investors paid a premium to AIGFP, and in return the company promised to
pick up the tab if the mortgage-backed CDOs went bust. But as Cassano went
on a selling spree, the deals he made differed from traditional insurance in
several significant ways. First, the party selling CDS protection didn't
have to post any money upfront. When a $100 corporate bond is sold, for
example, someone has to show 100 actual dollars. But when you sell a $100
CDS guarantee, you don't have to show a dime. So Cassano could sell
investment banks billions in guarantees without having any single asset to
back it up.

Secondly, Cassano was selling so-called "naked" CDS deals. In a "naked" CDS,
neither party actually holds the underlying loan. In other words, Bank B not
only sells CDS protection to Bank A for its mortgage on the Pope ? it turns
around and sells protection to Bank C for the very same mortgage. This could
go on ad nauseam: You could have Banks D through Z also betting on Bank A's
mortgage. Unlike traditional insurance, Cassano was offering investors an
opportunity to bet that someone else's house would burn down, or take out a
term life policy on the guy with AIDS down the street. It was no different
from gambling, the Wall Street version of a bunch of frat brothers betting
on Jay Feely to make a field goal. Cassano was taking book for every bank
that bet short on the housing market, but he didn't have the cash to pay off
if the kick went wide.

In a span of only seven years, Cassano sold some $500 billion worth of CDS
protection, with at least $64 billion of that tied to the subprime mortgage
market. AIG didn't have even a fraction of that amount of cash on hand to
cover its bets, but neither did it expect it would ever need any reserves.
So long as defaults on the underlying securities remained a highly unlikely
proposition, AIG was essentially collecting huge and steadily climbing
premiums by selling insurance for the disaster it thought would never come.

Initially, at least, the revenues were enormous: AIGFP's returns went from
$737 million in 1999 to $3.2 billion in 2005. Over the past seven years, the
subsidiary's 400 employees were paid a total of $3.5 billion; Cassano
himself pocketed at least $280 million in compensation. Everyone made their
money ? and then it all went to shit.

II. THE REGULATORS

Cassano's outrageous gamble wouldn't have been possible had he not had the
good fortune to take over AIGFP just as Sen. Phil Gramm ? a grinning,
laissez-faire ideologue from Texas ? had finished engineering the most
dramatic deregulation of the financial industry since Emperor Hien Tsung
invented paper money in 806 A.D. For years, Washington had kept a watchful
eye on the nation's banks. Ever since the Great Depression, commercial banks
? those that kept money on deposit for individuals and businesses ? had not
been allowed to double as investment banks, which raise money by issuing and
selling securities. The Glass-Steagall Act, passed during the Depression,
also prevented banks of any kind from getting into the insurance business.

But in the late Nineties, a few years before Cassano took over AIGFP, all
that changed. The Democrats, tired of getting slaughtered in the fundraising
arena by Republicans, decided to throw off their old reliance on unions and
interest groups and become more "business-friendly." Wall Street responded
by flooding Washington with money, buying allies in both parties. In the
10-year period beginning in 1998, financial companies spent $1.7 billion on
federal campaign contributions and another $3.4 billion on lobbyists. They
quickly got what they paid for. In 1999, Gramm co-sponsored a bill that
repealed key aspects of the Glass-Steagall Act, smoothing the way for the
creation of financial megafirms like Citigroup. The move did away with the
built-in protections afforded by smaller banks. In the old days, a local
banker knew the people whose loans were on his balance sheet: He wasn't
going to give a million-dollar mortgage to a homeless meth addict, since he
would have to keep that loan on his books. But a giant merged bank might
write that loan and then sell it off to some fool in China, and who cared?

The very next year, Gramm compounded the problem by writing a sweeping new
law called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that made it impossible
to regulate credit swaps as either gambling or securities. Commercial banks
? which, thanks to Gramm, were now competing directly with investment banks
for customers ? were driven to buy credit swaps to loosen capital in search
of higher yields. "By ruling that credit-default swaps were not gaming and
not a security, the way was cleared for the growth of the market," said Eric
Dinallo, head of the New York State Insurance Department.

The blanket exemption meant that Joe Cassano could now sell as many CDS
contracts as he wanted, building up as huge a position as he wanted, without
anyone in government saying a word. "You have to remember, investment banks
aren't in the business of making huge directional bets," says the government
source involved in the AIG bailout. When investment banks write CDS deals,
they hedge them. But insurance companies don't have to hedge. And that's
what AIG did. "They just bet massively long on the housing market," says the
source. "Billions and billions."

In the biggest joke of all, Cassano's wheeling and dealing was regulated by
the Office of Thrift Supervision, an agency that would prove to be defiantly
uninterested in keeping watch over his operations. How a behemoth like AIG
came to be regulated by the little-known and relatively small OTS is yet
another triumph of the deregulatory instinct. Under another law passed in
1999, certain kinds of holding companies could choose the OTS as their
regulator, provided they owned one or more thrifts (better known as
savings-and-loans). Because the OTS was viewed as more compliant than the
Fed or the Securities and Exchange Commission, companies rushed to
reclassify themselves as thrifts. In 1999, AIG purchased a thrift in
Delaware and managed to get approval for OTS regulation of its entire
operation.

Making matters even more hilarious, AIGFP ? a London-based subsidiary of an
American insurance company ? ought to have been regulated by one of Europe's
more stringent regulators, like Britain's Financial Services Authority. But
the OTS managed to convince the Europeans that it had the muscle to regulate
these giant companies. By 2007, the EU had conferred legitimacy to OTS
supervision of three mammoth firms ? GE, AIG and Ameriprise.

That same year, as the subprime crisis was exploding, the Government
Accountability Office criticized the OTS, noting a "disparity between the
size of the agency and the diverse firms it oversees." Among other things,
the GAO report noted that the entire OTS had only one insurance specialist
on staff ? and this despite the fact that it was the primary regulator for
the world's largest insurer!

"There's this notion that the regulators couldn't do anything to stop AIG,"
says a government official who was present during the bailout. "That's
bullshit. What you have to understand is that these regulators have ultimate
power. They can send you a letter and say, 'You don't exist anymore,' and
that's basically that. They don't even really need due process. The OTS
could have said, 'We're going to pull your charter; we're going to pull your
license; we're going to sue you.' And getting sued by your primary regulator
is the kiss of death."

When AIG finally blew up, the OTS regulator ostensibly in charge of
overseeing the insurance giant ? a guy named C.K. Lee ? basically admitted
that he had blown it. His mistake, Lee said, was that he believed all those
credit swaps in Cassano's portfolio were "fairly benign products." Why?
Because the company told him so. "The judgment the company was making was
that there was no big credit risk," he explained. (Lee now works as Midwest
region director of the OTS; the agency declined to make him available for an
interview.)

In early March, after the latest bailout of AIG, Treasury Secretary Timothy
Geithner took what seemed to be a thinly veiled shot at the OTS, calling AIG
a "huge, complex global insurance company attached to a very complicated
investment bank/hedge fund that was allowed to build up without any adult
supervision." But even without that "adult supervision," AIG might have been
OK had it not been for a complete lack of internal controls. For six months
before its meltdown, according to insiders, the company had been searching
for a full-time chief financial officer and a chief risk-assessment officer,
but never got around to hiring either. That meant that the 18th-largest
company in the world had no one checking to make sure its balance sheet was
safe and no one keeping track of how much cash and assets the firm had on
hand. The situation was so bad that when outside consultants were called in
a few weeks before the bailout, senior executives were unable to answer even
the most basic questions about their company ? like, for instance, how much
exposure the firm had to the residential-mortgage market.

III. THE CRASH

Ironically, when reality finally caught up to Cassano, it wasn't because the
housing market crapped but because of AIG itself. Before 2005, the company's
debt was rated triple-A, meaning he didn't need to post much cash to sell
CDS protection: The solid creditworthiness of AIG's name was guarantee
enough. But the company's crummy accounting practices eventually caused its
credit rating to be downgraded, triggering clauses in the CDS contracts that
forced Cassano to post substantially more collateral to back his deals.

By the fall of 2007, it was evident that AIGFP's portfolio had turned
poisonous, but like every good Wall Street huckster, Cassano schemed to keep
his insane, Earth-swallowing gamble hidden from public view. That August,
balls bulging, he announced to investors on a conference call that "it is
hard for us, without being flippant, to even see a scenario within any kind
of realm of reason that would see us losing $1 in any of those
transactions." As he spoke, his CDS portfolio was racking up $352 million in
losses. When the growing credit crunch prompted senior AIG executives to
re-examine its liabilities, a company accountant named Joseph St. Denis
became "gravely concerned" about the CDS deals and their potential for mass
destruction. Cassano responded by personally forcing the poor sap out of the
firm, telling him he was "deliberately excluded" from the financial review
for fear that he might "pollute the process."

The following February, when AIG posted $11.5 billion in annual losses, it
announced the resignation of Cassano as head of AIGFP, saying an auditor had
found a "material weakness" in the CDS portfolio. But amazingly, the company
not only allowed Cassano to keep $34 million in bonuses, it kept him on as a
consultant for $1 million a month. In fact, Cassano remained on the payroll
and kept collecting his monthly million through the end of September 2008,
even after taxpayers had been forced to hand AIG $85 billion to patch up his
fuck-ups. When asked in October why the company still retained Cassano at
his $1 million-a-month rate despite his role in the probable downfall of
Western civilization, CEO Martin Sullivan told Congress with a straight face
that AIG wanted to "retain the 20-year knowledge that Mr. Cassano had."
(Cassano, who is apparently hiding out in his lavish town house near Harrods
in London, could not be reached for comment.)

What sank AIG in the end was another credit downgrade. Cassano had written
so many CDS deals that when the company was facing another downgrade to its
credit rating last September, from AA to A, it needed to post billions in
collateral ? not only more cash than it had on its balance sheet but more
cash than it could raise even if it sold off every single one of its liquid
assets. Even so, management dithered for days, not believing the company was
in serious trouble. AIG was a dried-up prune, sapped of any real value, and
its top executives didn't even know it.

On the weekend of September 13th, AIG's senior leaders were summoned to the
offices of the New York Federal Reserve. Regulators from Dinallo's insurance
office were there, as was Geithner, then chief of the New York Fed. Treasury
Secretary Hank Paulson, who spent most of the weekend preoccupied with the
collapse of Lehman Brothers, came in and out. Also present, for reasons that
would emerge later, was Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs. The only
relevant government office that wasn't represented was the regulator that
should have been there all along: the OTS.

"We sat down with Paulson, Geithner and Dinallo," says a person present at
the negotiations. "I didn't see the OTS even once."

On September 14th, according to another person present, Treasury officials
presented Blankfein and other bankers in attendance with an absurd proposal:
"They basically asked them to spend a day and check to see if they could
raise the money privately." The laughably short time span to complete the
mammoth task made the answer a foregone conclusion. At the end of the day,
the bankers came back and told the government officials, gee, we checked,
but we can't raise that much. And the bailout was on.

A short time later, it came out that AIG was planning to pay some $90
million in deferred compensation to former executives, and to accelerate the
payout of $277 million in bonuses to others ? a move the company insisted
was necessary to "retain key employees." When Congress balked, AIG canceled
the $90 million in payments.

Then, in January 2009, the company did it again. After all those years
letting Cassano run wild, and after already getting caught paying out insane
bonuses while on the public till, AIG decided to pay out another $450
million in bonuses. And to whom? To the 400 or so employees in Cassano's old
unit, AIGFP, which is due to go out of business shortly! Yes, that's right,
an average of $1.1 million in taxpayer-backed money apiece, to the very
people who spent the past decade or so punching a hole in the fabric of the
universe!

"We, uh, needed to keep these highly expert people in their seats," AIG
spokeswoman Christina Pretto says to me in early February.

"But didn't these 'highly expert people' basically destroy your company?" I
ask.

Pretto protests, says this isn't fair. The employees at AIGFP have already
taken pay cuts, she says. Not retaining them would dilute the value of the
company even further, make it harder to wrap up the unit's operations in an
orderly fashion.

The bonuses are a nice comic touch highlighting one of the more outrageous
tangents of the bailout age, namely the fact that, even with the planet in
flames, some members of the Wall Street class can't even get used to the
tragedy of having to fly coach. "These people need their trips to Baja,
their spa treatments, their hand jobs," says an official involved in the AIG
bailout, a serious look on his face, apparently not even half-kidding. "They
don't function well without them."

IV. THE POWER GRAB

So that's the first step in wall street's power grab: making up things like
credit-default swaps and collateralized-debt obligations, financial products
so complex and inscrutable that ordinary American dumb people ? to say
nothing of federal regulators and even the CEOs of major corporations like
AIG ? are too intimidated to even try to understand them. That, combined
with wise political investments, enabled the nation's top bankers to
effectively scrap any meaningful oversight of the financial industry. In
1997 and 1998, the years leading up to the passage of Phil Gramm's fateful
act that gutted Glass-Steagall, the banking, brokerage and insurance
industries spent $350 million on political contributions and lobbying. Gramm
alone ? then the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee ? collected $2.6
million in only five years. The law passed 90-8 in the Senate, with the
support of 38 Democrats, including some names that might surprise you: Joe
Biden, John Kerry, Tom Daschle, Dick Durbin, even John Edwards.

The act helped create the too-big-to-fail financial behemoths like
Citigroup, AIG and Bank of America ? and in turn helped those companies
slowly crush their smaller competitors, leaving the major Wall Street firms
with even more money and power to lobby for further deregulatory measures.
"We're moving to an oligopolistic situation," Kenneth Guenther, a top
executive with the Independent Community Bankers of America, lamented after
the Gramm measure was passed.

The situation worsened in 2004, in an extraordinary move toward deregulation
that never even got to a vote. At the time, the European Union was
threatening to more strictly regulate the foreign operations of America's
big investment banks if the U.S. didn't strengthen its own oversight. So the
top five investment banks got together on April 28th of that year and ? with
the helpful assistance of then-Goldman Sachs chief and future Treasury
Secretary Hank Paulson ? made a pitch to George Bush's SEC chief at the
time, William Donaldson, himself a former investment banker. The banks
generously volunteered to submit to new rules restricting them from engaging
in excessively risky activity. In exchange, they asked to be released from
any lending restrictions. The discussion about the new rules lasted just 55
minutes, and there was not a single representative of a major media outlet
there to record the fateful decision.

Donaldson OK'd the proposal, and the new rules were enough to get the EU to
drop its threat to regulate the five firms. The only catch was, neither
Donaldson nor his successor, Christopher Cox, actually did any regulating of
the banks. They named a commission of seven people to oversee the five
companies, whose combined assets came to total more than $4 trillion. But in
the last year and a half of Cox's tenure, the group had no director and did
not complete a single inspection. Great deal for the banks, which originally
complained about being regulated by both Europe and the SEC, and ended up
being regulated by no one.

Once the capital requirements were gone, those top five banks went hog-wild,
jumping ass-first into the then-raging housing bubble. One of those was Bear
Stearns, which used its freedom to drown itself in bad mortgage loans. In
the short period between the 2004 change and Bear's collapse, the firm's
debt-to-equity ratio soared from 12-1 to an insane 33-1. Another culprit was
Goldman Sachs, which also had the good fortune, around then, to see its CEO,
a bald-headed Frankensteinian goon named Hank Paulson (who received an
estimated $200 million tax deferral by joining the government), ascend to
Treasury secretary.

Freed from all capital restraints, sitting pretty with its man running the
Treasury, Goldman jumped into the housing craze just like everyone else on
Wall Street. Although it famously scored an $11 billion coup in 2007 when
one of its trading units smartly shorted the housing market, the move didn't
tell the whole story. In truth, Goldman still had a huge exposure come that
fateful summer of 2008 ? to none other than Joe Cassano.

Goldman Sachs, it turns out, was Cassano's biggest customer, with $20
billion of exposure in Cassano's CDS book. Which might explain why Goldman
chief Lloyd Blankfein was in the room with ex-Goldmanite Hank Paulson that
weekend of September 13th, when the federal government was supposedly
bailing out AIG.

When asked why Blankfein was there, one of the government officials who was
in the meeting shrugs. "One might say that it's because Goldman had so much
exposure to AIGFP's portfolio," he says. "You'll never prove that, but one
might suppose."

Market analyst Eric Salzman is more blunt. "If AIG went down," he says,
"there was a good chance Goldman would not be able to collect." The AIG
bailout, in effect, was Goldman bailing out Goldman.

Eventually, Paulson went a step further, elevating another ex-Goldmanite
named Edward Liddy to run AIG ? a company whose bailout money would be
coming, in part, from the newly created TARP program, administered by
another Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari.

V. REPO MEN

There are plenty of people who have noticed, in recent years, that when they
lost their homes to foreclosure or were forced into bankruptcy because of
crippling credit-card debt, no one in the government was there to rescue
them. But when Goldman Sachs ? a company whose average employee still made
more than $350,000 last year, even in the midst of a depression ? was
suddenly faced with the possibility of losing money on the unregulated
insurance deals it bought for its insane housing bets, the government was
there in an instant to patch the hole. That's the essence of the bailout:
rich bankers bailing out rich bankers, using the taxpayers' credit card.

The people who have spent their lives cloistered in this Wall Street
community aren't much for sharing information with the great unwashed.
Because all of this shit is complicated, because most of us mortals don't
know what the hell LIBOR is or how a REIT works or how to use the word "zero
coupon bond" in a sentence without sounding stupid ? well, then, the people
who do speak this idiotic language cannot under any circumstances be
bothered to explain it to us and instead spend a lot of time rolling their
eyes and asking us to trust them.

That roll of the eyes is a key part of the psychology of Paulsonism. The
state is now being asked not just to call off its regulators or give tax
breaks or funnel a few contracts to connected companies; it is intervening
directly in the economy, for the sole purpose of preserving the influence of
the megafirms. In essence, Paulson used the bailout to transform the
government into a giant bureaucracy of entitled assholedom, one that would
socialize "toxic" risks but keep both the profits and the management of the
bailed-out firms in private hands. Moreover, this whole process would be
done in secret, away from the prying eyes of NASCAR dads, broke-ass liberals
who read translations of French novels, subprime mortgage holders and other
such financial losers.

Some aspects of the bailout were secretive to the point of absurdity. In
fact, if you look closely at just a few lines in the Federal Reserve's
weekly public disclosures, you can literally see the moment where a big
chunk of your money disappeared for good. The H4 report (called "Factors
Affecting Reserve Balances") summarizes the activities of the Fed each week.
You can find it online, and it's pretty much the only thing the Fed ever
tells the world about what it does. For the week ending February 18th, the
number under the heading "Repurchase Agreements" on the table is zero. It's
a significant number.

Why? In the pre-crisis days, the Fed used to manage the money supply by
periodically buying and selling securities on the open market through
so-called Repurchase Agreements, or Repos. The Fed would typically dump $25
billion or so in cash onto the market every week, buying up Treasury bills,
U.S. securities and even mortgage-backed securities from institutions like
Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan, who would then "repurchase" them in a short
period of time, usually one to seven days. This was the Fed's primary
mechanism for controlling interest rates: Buying up securities gives banks
more money to lend, which makes interest rates go down. Selling the
securities back to the banks reduces the money available for lending, which
makes interest rates go up.

If you look at the weekly H4 reports going back to the summer of 2007, you
start to notice something alarming. At the start of the credit crunch,
around August of that year, you see the Fed buying a few more Repos than
usual ? $33 billion or so. By November, as private-bank reserves were
dwindling to alarmingly low levels, the Fed started injecting even more cash
than usual into the economy: $48 billion. By late December, the number was
up to $58 billion; by the following March, around the time of the Bear
Stearns rescue, the Repo number had jumped to $77 billion. In the week of
May 1st, 2008, the number was $115 billion ? "out of control now," according
to one congressional aide. For the rest of 2008, the numbers remained
similarly in the stratosphere, the Fed pumping as much as $125 billion of
these short-term loans into the economy ? until suddenly, at the start of
this year, the number drops to nothing. Zero.

The reason the number has dropped to nothing is that the Fed had simply
stopped using relatively transparent devices like repurchase agreements to
pump its money into the hands of private companies. By early 2009, a whole
series of new government operations had been invented to inject cash into
the economy, most all of them completely secretive and with names you've
never heard of. There is the Term Auction Facility, the Term Securities
Lending Facility, the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, the Commercial Paper
Funding Facility and a monster called the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper
Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (boasting the chat-room
horror-show acronym ABCPMMMFLF). For good measure, there's also something
called a Money Market Investor Funding Facility, plus three facilities
called Maiden Lane I, II and III to aid bailout recipients like Bear Stearns
and AIG.

While the rest of America, and most of Congress, have been bugging out about
the $700 billion bailout program called TARP, all of these newly created
organisms in the Federal Reserve zoo have quietly been pumping not billions
but trillions of dollars into the hands of private companies (at least $3
trillion so far in loans, with as much as $5.7 trillion more in guarantees
of private investments). Although this technically isn't taxpayer money, it
still affects taxpayers directly, because the activities of the Fed impact
the economy as a whole. And this new, secretive activity by the Fed
completely eclipses the TARP program in terms of its influence on the
economy.

No one knows who's getting that money or exactly how much of it is
disappearing through these new holes in the hull of America's credit rating.
Moreover, no one can really be sure if these new institutions are even
temporary at all ? or whether they are being set up as permanent,
state-aided crutches to Wall Street, designed to systematically suck bad
investments off the ledgers of irresponsible lenders.

"They're supposed to be temporary," says Paul-Martin Foss, an aide to Rep.
Ron Paul. "But we keep getting notices every six months or so that they're
being renewed. They just sort of quietly announce it."

None other than disgraced senator Ted Stevens was the poor sap who made the
unpleasant discovery that if Congress didn't like the Fed handing trillions
of dollars to banks without any oversight, Congress could apparently go fuck
itself ? or so said the law. When Stevens asked the GAO about what authority
Congress has to monitor the Fed, he got back a letter citing an obscure
statute that nobody had ever heard of before: the Accounting and Auditing
Act of 1950. The relevant section, 31 USC 714(b), dictated that
congressional audits of the Federal Reserve may not include "deliberations,
decisions and actions on monetary policy matters." The exemption, as Foss
notes, "basically includes everything." According to the law, in other
words, the Fed simply cannot be audited by Congress. Or by anyone else, for
that matter.

VI. WINNERS AND LOSERS

Stevens isn't the only person in Congress to be given the finger by the Fed.
In January, when Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida asked Federal Reserve vice
chairman Donald Kohn where all the money went ? only $1.2 trillion had
vanished by then ? Kohn gave Grayson a classic eye roll, saying he would be
"very hesitant" to name names because it might discourage banks from taking
the money.

"Has that ever happened?" Grayson asked. "Have people ever said, 'We will
not take your $100 billion because people will find out about it?'"

"Well, we said we would not publish the names of the borrowers, so we have
no test of that," Kohn answered, visibly annoyed with Grayson's meddling.

Grayson pressed on, demanding to know on what terms the Fed was lending the
money. Presumably it was buying assets and making loans, but no one knew how
it was pricing those assets ? in other words, no one knew what kind of deal
it was striking on behalf of taxpayers. So when Grayson asked if the
purchased assets were "marked to market" ? a methodology that assigns a
concrete value to assets, based on the market rate on the day they are
traded ? Kohn answered, mysteriously, "The ones that have market values are
marked to market." The implication was that the Fed was purchasing
derivatives like credit swaps or other instruments that were basically
impossible to value objectively ? paying real money for God knows what.

"Well, how much of them don't have market values?" asked Grayson. "How much
of them are worthless?"

"None are worthless," Kohn snapped.

"Then why don't you mark them to market?" Grayson demanded.

"Well," Kohn sighed, "we are marking the ones to market that have market
values."

In essence, the Fed was telling Congress to lay off and let the experts
handle things. "It's like buying a car in a used-car lot without opening the
hood, and saying, 'I think it's fine,'" says Dan Fuss, an analyst with the
investment firm Loomis Sayles. "The salesman says, 'Don't worry about it.
Trust me.' It'll probably get us out of the lot, but how much farther? None
of us knows."

When one considers the comparatively extensive system of congressional
checks and balances that goes into the spending of every dollar in the
budget via the normal appropriations process, what's happening in the Fed
amounts to something truly revolutionary ? a kind of shadow government with
a budget many times the size of the normal federal outlay, administered
dictatorially by one man, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. "We spend hours and
hours and hours arguing over $10 million amendments on the floor of the
Senate, but there has been no discussion about who has been receiving this
$3 trillion," says Sen. Bernie Sanders. "It is beyond comprehension."

Count Sanders among those who don't buy the argument that Wall Street firms
shouldn't have to face being outed as recipients of public funds, that
making this information public might cause investors to panic and dump their
holdings in these firms. "I guess if we made that public, they'd go on
strike or something," he muses.

And the Fed isn't the only arm of the bailout that has closed ranks. The
Treasury, too, has maintained incredible secrecy surrounding its
implementation even of the TARP program, which was mandated by Congress. To
this date, no one knows exactly what criteria the Treasury Department used
to determine which banks received bailout funds and which didn't ?
particularly the first $350 billion given out under Bush appointee Hank
Paulson.

The situation with the first TARP payments grew so absurd that when the
Congressional Oversight Panel, charged with monitoring the bailout money,
sent a query to Paulson asking how he decided whom to give money to,
Treasury responded ? and this isn't a joke ? by directing the panel to a
copy of the TARP application form on its website. Elizabeth Warren, the
chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, was struck nearly speechless by
the response.

"Do you believe that?" she says incredulously. "That's not what we had in
mind."

Another member of Congress, who asked not to be named, offers his own theory
about the TARP process. "I think basically if you knew Hank Paulson, you got
the money," he says.

This cozy arrangement created yet another opportunity for big banks to
devour market share at the expense of smaller regional lenders. While all
the bigwigs at Citi and Goldman and Bank of America who had Paulson on
speed-dial got bailed out right away ? remember that TARP was originally
passed because money had to be lent right now, that day, that minute, to
stave off emergency ? many small banks are still waiting for help. Five
months into the TARP program, some not only haven't received any funds, they
haven't even gotten a call back about their applications.

"There's definitely a feeling among community bankers that no one up there
cares much if they make it or not," says Tanya Wheeless, president of the
Arizona Bankers Association.

Which, of course, is exactly the opposite of what should be happening, since
small, regional banks are far less guilty of the kinds of predatory lending
that sank the economy. "They're not giving out subprime loans or easy
credit," says Wheeless. "At the community level, it's much more
bread-and-butter banking."

Nonetheless, the lion's share of the bailout money has gone to the larger,
so-called "systemically important" banks. "It's like Treasury is picking
winners and losers," says one state banking official who asked not to be
identified.

This itself is a hugely important political development. In essence, the
bailout accelerated the decline of regional community lenders by boosting
the political power of their giant national competitors.

Which, when you think about it, is insane: What had brought us to the brink
of collapse in the first place was this relentless instinct for building
ever-larger megacompanies, passing deregulatory measures to gradually feed
all the little fish in the sea to an ever-shrinking pool of Bigger Fish. To
fix this problem, the government should have slowly liquidated these
monster, too-big-to-fail firms and broken them down to smaller, more
manageable companies. Instead, federal regulators closed ranks and used an
almost completely secret bailout process to double down on the same faulty,
merger-happy thinking that got us here in the first place, creating a
constellation of megafirms under government control that are even bigger,
more unwieldy and more crammed to the gills with systemic risk.

In essence, Paulson and his cronies turned the federal government into one
gigantic, half-opaque holding company, one whose balance sheet includes the
world's most appallingly large and risky hedge fund, a controlling stake in
a dying insurance giant, huge investments in a group of teetering megabanks,
and shares here and there in various auto-finance companies, student loans,
and other failing businesses. Like AIG, this new federal holding company is
a firm that has no mechanism for auditing itself and is run by leaders who
have very little grasp of the daily operations of its disparate subsidiary
operations.

In other words, it's AIG's rip-roaringly shitty business model writ almost
inconceivably massive ? to echo Geithner, a huge, complex global company
attached to a very complicated investment bank/hedge fund that's been
allowed to build up without adult supervision. How much of what kinds of
crap is actually on our balance sheet, and what did we pay for it? When
exactly will the rent come due, when will the money run out? Does anyone
know what the hell is going on? And on the linear spectrum of capitalism to
socialism, where exactly are we now? Is there a dictionary word that even
describes what we are now? It would be funny, if it weren't such a
nightmare.

VII. YOU DON'T GET IT

The real question from here is whether the Obama administration is going to
move to bring the financial system back to a place where sanity is restored
and the general public can have a say in things or whether the new financial
bureaucracy will remain obscure, secretive and hopelessly complex. It might
not bode well that Geithner, Obama's Treasury secretary, is one of the
architects of the Paulson bailouts; as chief of the New York Fed, he helped
orchestrate the Goldman-friendly AIG bailout and the secretive Maiden Lane
facilities used to funnel funds to the dying company. Neither did it look
good when Geithner ? himself a prot?g? of notorious Goldman alum John Thain,
the Merrill Lynch chief who paid out billions in bonuses after the state
spent billions bailing out his firm ? picked a former Goldman lobbyist named
Mark Patterson to be his top aide.

In fact, most of Geithner's early moves reek strongly of Paulsonism. He has
continually talked about partnering with private investors to create a
so-called "bad bank" that would systemically relieve private lenders of bad
assets ? the kind of massive, opaque, quasi-private bureaucratic nightmare
that Paulson specialized in. Geithner even refloated a Paulson proposal to
use TALF, one of the Fed's new facilities, to essentially lend cheap money
to hedge funds to invest in troubled banks while practically guaranteeing
them enormous profits.

God knows exactly what this does for the taxpayer, but hedge-fund managers
sure love the idea. "This is exactly what the financial system needs," said
Andrew Feldstein, CEO of Blue Mountain Capital and one of the Morgan Mafia.
Strangely, there aren't many people who don't run hedge funds who have
expressed anything like that kind of enthusiasm for Geithner's ideas.

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By
creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a
language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street
crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in
their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the
Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age
of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an
already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the
crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system ?
transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in
financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.

The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall
Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and
lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have
left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they
work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids
and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.

"But wait a minute," you say to them. "No one ever asked you to stay up all
night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what's left of
the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable
mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks. Actually,
come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people?
Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?"

But before you even finish saying that, they're rolling their eyes, because
You Don't Get It. These people were never about anything except turning
money into money, in order to get more money; valueswise they're on par with
crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes to steal
panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire political future
now rests.

Good luck with that, America. And enjoy tax season.

[From Issue 1075 

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From futurenotwritten at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 27 09:02:51 2009
From: futurenotwritten at yahoo.com (Jay Becker)
Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2009 06:02:51 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [CitizensTruth] Today, yet MORE troops to Afghanistan
Message-ID: <746920.7229.qm@web33502.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

>From Debra Sweet, national director of World Can't Wait (www.worldcantwait.org):






Today- - Friday -- Barack Obama will announce sending an
additional 4000 troops to Afghanistan in addition to
the?17,000 additional troops he already announced last month. 



This means that, in total, Obama is sending an additional 21,000 U.S.
troops to Afghanistan. 
?
This is not change. This is an escalation of a?crime
against humanity.?
What are these troops being sent to do??Murder, rape, and
torture?innocent men, women, and children; kick down doors and
terrorize families... all so that the U.S. can tighten its stranglehold
on the land, resources, and shipping routes of Middle East. 
?
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/03/26/us.afghanistan.troops/index.html


This is completely intolerable. 
?
http://worldcantwait.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5223:to-the-anti-war-movement-in-the-united-states&catid=117:homepage&Itemid=289
 



    Stop thinking like an American, 
Start thinking about humanity!



      
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From r.gillam at comcast.net  Sat Mar 28 20:40:55 2009
From: r.gillam at comcast.net (Ragen Gillam)
Date: Sat, 28 Mar 2009 19:40:55 -0500
Subject: [CitizensTruth] FW: We did it to Mexico
Message-ID: <20090329004047.5E8FB6CE87@six.pairlist.net>

 

 

Samizdat

 

We destroyed Mexico

Art Hilgart

1. We instituted prohibition of non-alcoholic recreational drugs, making
them expensive, and in the absence of quality, strength, and purity control,
made them risky to users.  It also made the market for them extremely
profitable, which created a boom in organized crime, with associated
violence and killing in turf wars.

 

2. Although guns and gun owners annually kill many thousands more than drugs
and terrorists, we make guns---  including assault weapons--- freely
available and virtually unregulated.

 

3. NAFTA opened Mexico to the import of cheap U.S. corn, destroying the
Mexican agricultural sector.

 

4. NAFTA allowed American firms to export assembly factories to Mexico and
removed Mexican laws requiring local manufacture for domestic consumption.
At first this created across-the-border American factories employing
Mexicans at very low wages and with poor working conditions, which sopped up
some of those unemployed in agriculture and Mexican industry, but when the
American factories moved to China, the damage to Mexico was complete: cities
filled with former farmers, former workers in Mexican industry, and former
workers in our border sweatshops.

 

5. The main opportunity for the unemployed displaced then became the risky
but profitable occupation of exporting banned drugs to the United States .
This created opportunities to corrupt the police and courts.  As in the U.
S., this has led to lethal turf wars and endemic homicide.  The guns are
supplied by gun dealers in the United States.

 

Thus not only does the United States suffer all the evils of our failed
attempt to ban alcohol, we have also exported them to Mexico.

    

We have filled our prisons with drug users entrapped by police to fill
arrest quotas, but drug use persists, and a few more people die each year
from unintended overdoses.  And Mexico is in ruins.

 

So it goes.

 

art at hilgart.us

 

 

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