"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, (i.e., the "business cycle") the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."
"Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom."
John F. Kennedy
New Age Citizen www.newagecitizen.com December 20th, 2008 Edition [Last Update: January 15h, 2008]
With the crumbling global economy and "whatnot" it is easy to forget that we are celebrating the birth of Jesus this December 25th. And regardless of your spiritual orientation I think we can all agree that the holiday is meant to be an opportunity to reflect on the prospects for peace and goodwill to all the peace loving inhabitants of the planet. At any rate there is probably no contemporary figure that embraced these values more than the late John Lennon and his group, the Beatles. So lets get started with a little "All You Need is Love" and John Lennon's "So This Is Christmas:"
Hope you all enjoyed that. Now back to reality . . .
Since the last edition of "New Age Citizen" we have seen actions by Obama that are disconcerting to say the least. Of course I tried to warn you about Obama early on in my essay "Curious Obama," however, it is now pretty clear that my warnings were right on the mark.
The first evidence of his Globalist tendencies will be found in the videos I have included within the essay, "Proof that Obama Supports the North American Union and the New World Order." In this essay you will find that Obama is loading his cabinet, and other high ranking positions, with people that have long supported "corporate trade agreements," the North American Union and global government: The New World Order. The second piece of evidence will be found in the essay "Yes We Can -- Have Legal, Untaxed Marijuana," where Obama has recently decided that Legalizing Marijuana is "not in the cards" despite the fact that it was the most supported initiative at his website www.change.gov. The third piece of evidence is discussed in the essay, "How Not to Solve the Housing Crisis: Let in More Immigrants." which speaks to Obama's intent to continue to allow Legal Immigration during a period of unprecedented job losses by Legal American citizens.
I have also included writings by other authors that further "connect the dots" between Obama's Globalist Agenda and other concurrent trends such as the introduction of Military Troops for civilian enforcement and the planned economic destruction of the American Working Class in order to force us toward a One World Government:
* Bailout for the People: “The Cook Plan” by Richard C. Cook * Obama & McCain on Professional Workers - Bottom Line American Workers, YOU’RE SCREWED! * Army ‘Strategic Shock’ Report Says Troops May Be Needed To Quell U.S. Civil Unrest * Obama's Globalist Wish List
With all this in mind we should be thinking about impeaching Obama, rather than inaugurating him.
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I'm trying to give more continuity to the homepage by dividing the content into the following sections:
Section
Description
From Editor Bruce W. Cain
Original articles by New Age Citizen Editor, Bruce W. Cain
Bruce W. Cain in Action
Radio, TV and Live Appearances.
Articles and Commentary
Articles from the web and other sources, with the commentary remarks at the beginning of the article.
Videos for Viewing and Discussing
Education and Entertaining videos for personal and group viewing and discussing. I encourage people to gather groups together at your homes, and apartments, and view/discuss these videos as a group. The easiest thing to do is set around a laptop or desktop. A better solution is to plug your internet connected laptop to your large screen TV. If you play the video full screen a large screen TV should easily accommodate viewing by groups of 20 people.
Comment: I have begun publishing some of my articles at OpEdNews. You can read the responses to this article at the link above. You can read some of my other OpEdNews articles at the following links:
What follows is my response to the following article by Naomi Klein:
==================================================== Want to End the Violence in Gaza? Boycott Israel. By Naomi Klein, The Nation. Posted January 9, 2009. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090126/klein?rel=hp_currently ====================================================
First let me start by saying that Naomi Klein's, the "Shock Doctrine," is one of the most important books of the last 10 years. But Naomi is dead wrong to insist on a boycott of Israel.
First take a look at Israel. It has been painted into a corner by a host of countries that have recently been infected with virulent Islamism: a religion that castigates gays, Jews and basically anyone that have not, or will not, embrace Islam.
Bush poured gasoline on the Islamic fire by touting "democracy" which our founding fathers saw as the most reprehensible system in the world, unless it was contained by a Bill of Rights. Within that Bill of Rights is a call for absolute separation between church and state. As a result democratic elections brought Hezbollah to Lebanon and Hamas to the Gaza Strip.
And to further this destructive calculus we have Saudi Arabia and the United States fanning the flames of Islamic Fascism as well. The United States has done this through support for the KLA in Kosovo, the Taliban in Afghanistan and the ISI in Pakistan.
As a result we now have forming a very dangerous Islamic Crescent throughout the Middle East which is most definitely in ascendancy as I speak.
It is curious how Klein, and many others, gloss over some very inconvenient facts:
(1) Hamas does not recognize Israel's right to exist. (2) Hamas has announced, on more than one occasion, that it wants to wipe Israel off the map. (3) Hamas has been hurling missiles at Israel ever since it secured power, through a democratic election, just a few years ago.
The solution to this problem is to destroy Islamism wherever it exists and that would be in every Muslim country that allows the practice of Sharia laws. Obama needs to stop any further US economic support to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other Islamic Theocracies: should they not immediately eradicate all vestiges of Sharia. That is the only viable answer.
And before you open your uninformed mouth on this one let us just consider that this is exactly what had to happen to put Roman Catholicism back in their place. It is also a solution recommended by many Muslims including Irshad Manji: the lesbian author of "The Trouble With Islam."
Before the Enlightenment, and the Reformation, Roman Catholicism engaged in Inquisitions and Crusades. During this reign of terror both Christian (e.g., Gnostic) and Pagan believers died by the Roman Catholic sword, just as non-Muslims are today.
If you go to my the "Dearbornistan" sub web of my website, www.newagecitizen.com, you will understand the truth of what I am stating here. Islamism is a disease that needs to be eradicated from the planet. It is the last virulent vestige of Theocracy that must be removed from the planet.
Having said that, I would also recommend the removal of a less apparent theocracy that goes by the name of Corporatism, or simply Fascism. Naomi Klein is very familiar with this nemisis. This is a religion that worships money at the expense of everything else -- including the people it is suppose to serve. Unfortunately it is becoming more apparent, by the day, that Obama, worships at the Church of Corporatism. And I hope nothing more than to be wrong on this one.
We have most probably never entered such uncertain times as we find ourselves today. But that does not mean that there isn't a humanitarian solution. In the case of Gaza the solution is, in part, the recognition by Hamas, of Israel's right to exist. And unfortunately if they don't do this we could very well be seeing the beginnings of the next World War. Because once the Lebanese Hezbollah unleash from the North, the entire world will be drawn into this evolving disaster.
Unfortunately, Naomi Klein remains clueless about the danger that Islam poses, not just to Israel, but to the entire world. And while you chew on this you might well ask yourself why the US has fanned the flames of Islamic Extremism for so many, many decades.
I don't have the time or patience to explain this one to you. Fortunately the following article, by Professor Peter Dale Scott, will at least suffice as a primer, from which you might begin to understand the larger "agenda" that is presently being forced upon us.
Martial Law, the Financial Bailout, and War by Prof. Peter Dale Scott Global Research, January 8, 2009 http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20090107&articleId=11681
In my estimation this is part of the plan towards world domination by Globalists such as Kissinger and Brzezinski. I surely hope on wrong on this one. But unfortunately my predictions have, for the most part, materialized. I can only hope that Obama and others begin to understand what I am requesting. Because the truth is, if we can eliminate the theocratic tendancies of Islam, we might just resolve this problem without the need for a single additional death.
And all I am asking is that Islam recognize that they have no right to compel or coerce others to believe in their pathetic misogynistic theocratic agenda. And if they cannot do that we, the freemen and freewomen of this planet will have little recourse, other than to forcefully put them back in their place. And if we could do it to Roman Catholicism, don't feel too slighted as we insist on also doing it to Islamism.
WE HAVE NO way of determining which Muslims subscribe to pure Islam. The reason this matters is that pure Islam is seditious. Islamic doctrine is more political than religious, and its sole political goal is the domination of Islam over all over religions and all governments.
It is a Muslim's religious duty to achieve that political goal.
When Muslims move to a country, a certain percentage of them start agitating for special considerations. They start to organize and influence the nation politically in a way that is good for Islam and bad for freedom and equality. When the percentage of the Muslims in a nation's population becomes high enough, they gain so much political power that freedoms and rights begin to disappear. (Watch this video to learn more: http://www.citizenwarrior.com/2008/10/how-jihadis-invade-country-and-take.html ) Given all this, until we have a way of determining who is dedicated to pure Islam, no more Muslims should be allowed to immigrate into free countries.
Does this seem extreme? It's not as bad as it might seem. We already choose who can immigrate and who cannot. We make the rules. This is our country, after all. We are not under any obligation to allow anyone to immigrate who wants to. They do it with our blessing or they don't do it.
So this policy is simply adding to the already-existing filter.
This is not racist. Islam is not a race; it's an ideology. The policy of stopping Muslim immigration is simply acknowledging the reality of the Islamic teachings. I know there are Muslims who reject the violent and intolerant verses of the Qur'an. But Islam also teaches taqiyya and we have no way of knowing who is sincere and who is deliberately deceiving us.
We should not take the chance, at least until we find some way to discern between people who genuinely reject the political goals of Islam and those who do not. In the meantime, we should stop all immigration into free countries by Muslims while we can. You can get the process started right now by signing this petition: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/no-more-Muslim-immigration
Does signing a petition do any good? According to ThePetitionSite (the organization I used to create this petition), the answer is: "Yes — often, but the answer really depends on a number of factors. In general, the more a target organization is impacted by public opinion, the more effective are the petitions. In addition, ThePetitionSite enhances the credibility of online petitions by centralizing signature collection, structuring/regulating signature data collection and output, facilitating communication of petitions via fax, email, etc. and by using fraud-reduction technology. Remember — the effect of a petition usually goes far beyond the actual list of signatures. Journalists write stories about the petitions, signers get inspired to take additional actions, and other "potential targets" conform their behavior to avoid being a target."
Petitions can also exert an influence through two powerful principles of influence: Social proof and commitment and consistency. Petitions have been known to ignite important public debates.
When this petition reaches 50,000 signatures, I will make sure each member of the House and the Senate finds out about it. And I will make sure newspapers and magazines all over the country find out about it. Your signature will make a difference. Sign the petition today: No More Muslim Immigration ( http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/no-more-Muslim-immigration )
I only share a small fraction of the readings I have done at the website: www.newagecitizen.com. But I archive most of my readings in Microsoft Word files. So If you want to read more here are some additional reading that you can read or print to read off line.
Each file is dated at the time I begin adding articles. So the document "AOL081217.doc" was authored on December 17th, 2008.
For anyone that wants to read the entire compilation you must get a "membership" by sending $100 (check or money order to "Bruce W. Cain") to:
New Age Citizen PO Box 419 Dearborn Heights, MI 48127
For that I will send you a DVD with hundreds of files consisting of thousands of articles spanning the last 5+ years. The writing are encyclopedic in scope and are formatted just like the "freebies" that I have provided above. Each article contains the original text along with a hyperlink to the original citation. It would take months just to read through all of the articles.
Upon minimal inspection it is clear that Marijuana Re-Legalization is the most popular recommendation to Obama in both the 1st and 2nd www.change.gov polls. So when is Obama going to bend to the will of the American People?
Note: The following statistics were collected 12/30/2008 at 3:00 PM EST. This is important to know as the polling is continuing till at least 12/31/2008. At that time 44,298 people have submitted 36,864 questions and cast 1,962,040 votes.
I visited Obama's www.change.gov website to see if Marijuana Re-Legalization was leading again, as it came in first in during the first poll. At first I was disappointed because the first Re-Legalization question was ranked 26th of 36,864 questions. Still not bad. And the leading scoring question was a good one at that:
"I'm concerned about the banks who received tax payers money and have had no accountability. Will this be corrected after President elect Obama is in office?"
The leading question (above) below got 9,862 Yes and 600 no votes
But I then typed "marijuana" in "Search questions" field and clicked to find that 1,071 questions had been submitted regarding Marijuana Legalization. In other words a little less than 3 percent of the questions were focused on Re-Legalizing Marijuana.
And as I went down the list of "Marijuana" questions I noticed that many had overwhelming percentages in favor of Re-Legalization and many had "yes" responses of over 2,000. So there is little doubt that, in aggregate, Marijuana Re-Legalization is destined to come in first place in the second Obama poll. In fact I believe there is more support for Legalization in the 2nd poll than in the first. But Obama's website does not have the tools available to quantify this.
The only unfortunate aspect of the Marijuana questions is that they invariably insist on taxing and regulating it, which I believe to be a very bad idea. This "legalize and tax" model appears to be an instilled "Pavlovian" response of far too many Marijuana Re-Legalization advocates. Still, it is great to see such support for Marijuana Re-Legalization. Perhaps this second poll will convince Obama that saying "No" to Re-Legalization is just going to seriously "piss off" the American People?
I would highly recommend that my readers consider the MERP Model for Re-Legalization over any "legalize and tax" model. The following links will provide all the background you need to understand the MERP Model that I had authored around 2000.
What is more important, right now, is to get as many votes on "Re-Legalization" as possible. Here is how you can efficiently register your recommendation for Obama to Re-Legalize Marijuana.
(2) Click on "Open for Questions: Round two" (3) Click on "Open for Questions" link on new webpage. (4) Click on "View Questions" (5) Type "marijuana" in "Search questions" field and click
From here you can go through the list of Marijuana Re-Legalization questions and click on the "check mark" (not the "X") in order to register a "Yes" vote.
Now I have submitted 3 questions that you can search for with the following respective searches, using the 5-step procedure outlined above.
"If we legalize Marijuana under the MERP Model (a model similar to laws surrounding home brewing of beer) we could save 20 billion in DEA funds and destroy the drug cartels and drug gangs without spending another dime. Obama needs to Re-Legalize Now!" [Use "MERP" as the search criteria]
"Obama should implement all 10 planks of the "New Agenda for America" by May 1st or he should be impeached. More information at: www.newagecitizen.com/NAA.htm" [Use "New Agenda" as the search criteria]
"If Obama doesn't Legalize Marijuana, Stop All Immigration and Bailout the Legal American worker . . . let's impeach him on July 4th, 2009." bcainw, www.newagecitizen.com - Economy View response Post a response [Use "Stop All Immigration" as the search criteria]
Please help me get these recommendations to the top of Obama's latest poll. It is time to send the president-elect a serious message.
The following videos should make clear to every American that Obama is a supporter of the North American Union and the move towards a New World Order. In the first video Lou Dobbs connects the dots between some of his recent appointments and their respective support for such measures. In the second video Congresswomen Kaptur (OH) describes linkages between Ford Motor Company, China, Mexico and the Trans Texas Corridor: otherwise known as the NAFTA Super Highway.
It is my learned opinion that if the American People don't stand up now millions of Americans will soon find themselves homeless, jobless and lining up for food at the local homeless shelters. The time to act is now. I apologize to all those that put their faith in Obama. But the inconvenient truth is the Obama is just the latest sycophant for the New World Order and the "change" that he intends will mean nothing but misery for the American people.
When I read that Gary Shilling, president of A. Gary Shilling & Co is encouraging a policy whereby we increase immigration, in order to sell off OUR houses, I was ready to look for a hammer to crucify this traitor against the nearest standing tree. But unfortunately that is most likely going to be part of Obama's policy if we don't act very soon.
Just consider that in 2008 we have already lost nearly 2.5 million American jobs and the year is not even up yet. Normally we should have created 250,000 jobs each month just to keep current with the new American workers entering the workplace. So really we are looking at a net loss of 5.5 million jobs. The only thing that Obama has yet suggested is that he is going to create 2.5 million jobs over the next 2 years, at a time when forecasters estimate another million jobs to be lost in 2009 and possibly 2010.
As we are seeing, with each passing day, Obama is not turning out to be the "champion of change" that American's hoped to see. Yet the real solution is obvious, yet carefully kept out of the Mainstream (e.g., Old and Useless) Media.
And that real solution?
Place an immediate moratorium on all Legal and Illegal Immigration.
We are currently bringing in about 2.5 million Legal immigrants each year and while illegal immigration is tapering off, a bit, we are still seeing at least 2 million illegal immigrants coming in each year. That amounts to about 5 million immigrants, per year, at a time American workers are loosing close to 5 million jobs each year. We are talking about a net loss of American jobs that could realistically be in the range of 10 million jobs per year! In light of these facts how could Obama NOT impose such a "time out" on immigration? Perhaps it's because he really doesn't give a damn for the American People?
I've been lobbying for a moratorium on both Legal and Illegal Immigration for at least 5 years now. And recently conservative Pat Buchannan has joined that bandwagon, as well as Ron Beck from www.NumbersUSA.com. You can listen to a more comprehensive list of my recommendations in the following video.
Challenge for Obama to Stop Home Foreclosures Now!
In any case we must do something to save the jobs and homes for Legal American Citizens. So I encourage you make a point of calling and/or writing your representatives and tell them "No More Immigration: Legal or Illegal."
You can call you representatives at the following number:
202-224-3121
You can determine who all of your Federal, State and Local Representatives are by clicking here.
In addition I urge you to copy and paste this article to as many groups and individuals as you can. There is no time to wait for Obama to "sell us out" come January 21st. The time to resist is now.
And if you want to get real angry just go ahead and listen to how Gary Shilling would like to see American Workers get further screwed. Unfortunately it is exactly what Obama has in mind, once he gets in office. Perhaps we can deport him back to Kenya before then?
In order to prevent another disastrous wave of foreclosures and stem the decline in home prices, America should allow in more immigrants and give them incentives to buy homes, says Gary Shilling, president of A. Gary Shilling & Co.
A smaller version of this plan was successful in Canada and Shilling notes it could be combined with an expansion of the H1-B visas that Silicon Valley says are in such short supply.
If "letting in more immigrants to buy houses" sounds like a drastic step, that's because drastic action is needed.
Because there's too much inventory of unsold homes and not enough qualified buyers to soak it up, lower mortgage rates won't save the housing market, Shilling says. That's especially true with unemployment rising and a "deflation mindset" among potential buyers (i.e., the longer you wait, the lower prices will go).
A noted and notable bear, Shilling predicts the following will occur unless drastic action is taken:
Average U.S. home prices will fall another 20% from current levels, bringing the peak-to-trough decline to 37%. If prices ultimately do fall 37%, 25 million Americans — or about 50% of all U.S. homeowners with a mortgage — will be underwater, meaning their house will be worth less than their mortgage. Millions of Americans won't be able to make mortgage payments, even if they're able to refi at today's low rates.
I will expand on this later but I am basically trying to organize a "grass roots" campaign to Re-Legalize Marijuana by May 2nd, 2009, under the guidelines of the MERP Model. Please begin posting the following graphic on your websites, MySpace pages etc. This is the kind of CHANGE we have been expecting. And this is the kind of CHANGE we are going to begin to demand.
Please take a moment to look at the following screenshot from Obama's transition website: www.change.gov
The screenshot was taken on 12/20/2008 and I've preserved it because I will bet that he will bury this "skunky corpse" in a matter of days. Why? Because it illustrates that Obama has absolutely no intention of bending to the will of the American people. The screenshot shows that the most requested "change" that the American people want to see is the Re-Legalization of Marijuana.
Let's think about this for a moment. Nearly 20,000 Americans offered nearly 10,000 suggested changes and Marijuana Re-Legalization received the most support of any other suggested change.
So here was how the suggested change -- that received the most support of ANY other question -- was worded:
"Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and create a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?"
And here is the insulting response we got to the most supported suggestion for change, from President Elect Obama's transition team:
President-elect Obama is not in favor of the legalization of marijuana. Transition Team, Washington, D.C.
So Obama thinks he can just "blow us off" on the issue of Marijuana Re-Legalization despite the good that Marijuana Re-Legalization could bring:
(1) It would destroy the Mexican Drug Cartels and local drug gangs.
(2) It would provide some counterbalance to the liberties lost through the Patriot Act and other legislation that received bi-partisan support from Republicans and Democrats alike.
(3) It would erase the criminal records of millions of upstanding American's whose only crime was to use a harmless non-alcoholic drug.
But of course that is exactly why Obama will not Re-Legalize Marijuana. Most of his campaign money came from the very interests that are opposed to Marijuana Re-Legalization. Consider the following:
* Attorneys will loose out on profiting from the near 840,000 Marijuana arrests each year. * Drug testing labs will loose huge amounts of revenue. * The Prison Industrial Complex will be gutted and the US will no longer have the largest per capita number of its citizens behind bars or in some other form of judicial control * The Multi-National Banks that launder billions in drug money, each year, will loose significant revenue * Drug gangs, and drug cartels alike, will collapse as Re-Legalized Marijuana has a “Gatekeeper” effect (e.g., since users will be able to “brew” their own Marijuana they will have less contact with those that sell harder drugs such as Heroin, Cocaine and Methamphetamine. * The government will no longer be able to doing anything with all that surveillance data they insist on accumulating on each American Citizen. * Clemency for all non-violent drug use will reduce the absurd amounts of money spent on the Prison Industrial Complex and the number of felons will be reduced drastically.
Yep, the same scumbags that financed his campaign are those most opposed to Re-Legalizing Marijuana. That is why Obama is "just saying no." Obama is the marionette and they are the ones pulling the strings.
It is up to us to ensure that his renouncement does not stand. It is time to stand up and be counted. Demand that Marijuana is completely Legalized by May 1st, 2009 through the MERP Model:
Please access the following links to better understand the MERP Model and other aspect of real meaningful drug reform:
Consider his intransigence to Marijuana Re-Legalization as a mere prelude to the Globalist Agenda that Obama is likely to pursue as soon as he becomes President of the United States on January 20th, 2009.
I know many will call me nuts for saying it but isn't it time we took this country back?
Just the other day I read through some Yahoo Group responses on the subject of Re-Legalizing Marijuana. I really had to laugh at some of the self-defeating postings about the subject of Legalizing Marijuana. All of them from people that just can't visualize a world in which Marijuana is as legal as beer. How pathetic. Perhaps they deserve to be reduced to slaves?
'City dwellers will not be able to grow their own.'
Really. With a 400 Watt HID lamp you could easily grow 4 plants . . . possible 6. That amounts to about an once per week.
12 weeks * 4 plants * 2.5 oz/plant . . . or about 10 ounces every 12 weeks: about an once per week.
Now when I "used to smoke" my usage was never more than 2 grams per week. So unless you are a medical patient, like Angel Raich who consumes about 2 ounces a week, you're in pretty good shape.
'The government is going to trace those who buy from vending machines and bust them all.'
Only if we allow it. More and more Americans are arming themselves post election. If enough of us follow suit they aren't even going to think about this one. 20,000 US Military against 300,000,000 . . . they wouldn't last a month. And hopefully such a confrontation would never occur should our soldiers understand who they are really here to protect: that would be the American People.
'It is very complex to change the Marijuana laws.'
Oh really. First off they just robbed us to the tune of 8.5 Trillion Dollars in the last 3 months without breaking a sweat. All that is required to end Marijuana Prohibition is to pass legislation that would take Marijuana completely off the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. When we decide to wake up and pressure our representatives this could also happen in the blink of an eye.
As Mick Jagger famously said in Street Fighting Man:
Everywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet, boy cause summers here and the time is right for fighting in the street, But what can a poor boy do Except to sing for a rock n roll band cause in sleepy London town There's just no place for a street fighting man No Hey! think the time is right for a palace revolution But where I live the game they play is compromise solution
It is time to stop accepting these "compromised solutions" that get us absolutely nowhere. It is the favorite ploy of the Global Elite. That is what you get from the various "drug reform" organizations: MPP, DPA, NORML and the Ford Foundation sycophants at "AlterNet." Screw them all. They are more interested in keeping their jobs than solving the problem. Some one once said that the best way to get nothing done is to form a committee. That is exactly what these groups are and it is not in their interest to actually resolve the non-problem of Marijuana Re-Legalization. Don't you get it. Once Marijuana is legal there will be no need for their existence.
Obama was screwing us before the election by signing FISA and the Bailout. Now he's screwing us again even before he gets in office by telling us he has no intention of Legalizing Marijuana: even though it was the number one suggestion at his "www.change.gov" website. And he will be screwing us the minute he does get in office by granting Amnesty to 12-30 million Illegal's; by allowing 3 million foreigners to take our jobs, each year, during the worst economic period since the depression. And he has loaded his appointees and cabinet members with CFR members and others that are 100% behind the North American Union.
Now is the time for the 2nd American Revolution.
Obama is choosing to be the enemy, of the American People, through the actions that I have just described above.
The Apocalypse - the lifting of the veil -- is upon us. Those of the mystic traditions have long predicted a time when a revolutionary body of knowledge would be "revealed" to the masses. The Internet has given us that knowledge, largely censored by the Main Stream Media. We can now understand the lies of the Mainstream Media on a dally basis. So, now comes the interesting part -- putting that knowledge to work.
So lets hit the ground running on January 21st. Legalize Marijuana by May 1st, 2009, or we're going to send Obama back to Kenya. It is either going to by "Our Change" or "Your Impeachment." And by all means, if you go to the Inauguration, bring large banners with you saying "Re-Legalize Marijuana Now!"
I've been involved in Drug Reform for over 20 years. I have known every major player from Ed Rosenthal to Jack Herer. I have witnessed as my fellow activists -- Tom Crosslin and Rollie -- were murdered by the Bush administration (and now Michigan Governor Granholm) at Rainbow Farm: just a week before the destruction of the World Trade Center on November 11th, 2001. I understand the problem and I know the solution. It is most definitely the MERP Model for Marijuana Re-Legalization. If you can only watch one video, of mine, make it this one:
This extemporaneous live lecture is not really about Marijuana -- it is about destroying the New World Order and their Globalist agenda. Please take the time to watch it, if you haven't already. The window of opportunity is closing and the time to act is NOW!!!
Get on my mailing list at the New Age Citizen Website.
Your marching orders will be coming no later than New Years day. 2009 is not the year for New Years Resolutions. 2009 is the Year for New Years Revolutions.
Screw Obama. He is a traitor to everything our Founding Fathers stood for. And his pronouncements and appointments make this clearer with each passing day.
Lets do something different in 2009. Let's get off our butts and demand the change that we believe in: Legal Marijuana and a country by, for and of the American People.
Bruce Cain, Editor of "New Age Citizen," talks about the history of Marijuana and how its prohibition is part of a larger Globalist agenda to push us towards a Post-Constitutional New World Order where inalienable rights are no longer guaranteed. He believes that both Obama and McCain have been selected to further this agenda and that citizens should stop legitimizing the "Election Charade" by writing in the names of 3rd Party and Independent Presidential Candidates. He further believes that the American People must organize to stop either candidate from pushing us further toward a Globalist New World Order when one of them becomes our next president in January 2009.
This lecture was given before a "live audience" at the Trumbull-Plex Theatre on Sunday, October 19th, 2008: just 2 weeks before the Presidential Election. The Trumbull-Plex Theatre is located in Detroit, Michigan. He was the featured speaker at this event that was celebrating that Michigan will most probably be the 13th State to Legalize Marijuana for Medicinal use. Bruce Cain encourages the distribution of this video in order to de-legitimize the 2008 Presidential Election and challenge the New World Order in 2009.
If nothing else it is a fact filled journey tracing the history of the animal kingdom's consensual relationship with mind altering drugs over the millennia. But it actually goes much further, tracing the role that Marijuana Prohibition has had in the building of a "Technological Cage" by which the New World Order is slowly stripping away the inalienable rights guaranteed by the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
The ninth plank of my “New Agenda for America” calls for an end to the Federal Reserve. I think Richard Cooks prescription is one of the best models that I have yet encountered to fulfill that requirement.
But to prevent our fall from Democratic Republic to Fascist Empire will require many other bold, non-compromising changes to occur simultaneously. I have tried to enumerate some of the more important changes in the 10-Plank “New Agenda for America.”
Finally, I think the most important thing we can do now, and I mean immediately, is to impose a nation-wide moratorium on all further foreclosures or evictions from primary residences. Non-working residents should also be absolved from paying property and other taxes.
This is the “End Game” of the Globalist Agenda. They want to leave the American Worker both homeless and penniless in order to impose the final solution: An Elitist Global Government. Insuring that Americans have adequate food and shelter, as described above, will defend against what could otherwise be the fatal blow to the American Working Class.
I like to think of the “New Agenda for America” as an antidote to the disease that can be described as :”Elitist One World Government.” Each plank, in one way or another, destabilizes the infrastructure required to impose :”Elitist One World Government..”
Prepared for the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network Annual Conference New York, N.Y., February 27-March 1, 2009 Submitted by Richard C. Cook December 12, 2008
This system is not free enterprise, and it is not capitalism.
It is a cancer that is destroying the world.
We Hold These Truths by Richard C. Cook
Originally uploaded by Lorri37 Isn’t it Finally Time to Enact a Basic Income Guarantee?
The lack of individual and family income security in the midst of a highly-developed economy is a travesty under any circumstances, but the basic contradiction of “poverty in the midst of plenty” that has plagued the world since the start of the Industrial Revolution is becoming much worse in the early years of the 21st century as the Recession of 2008 picks up speed.
Winston Churchill spoke on the subject when giving the Romanes Lecture at Oxford University on June 19, 1930, a few months after the crash of the U.S. stock market that started the Great Depression. He said:
“Who would have thought that it would be easier to produce by toil and skill all the most necessary or desirable commodities than it is to find consumers for them? Who would have thought that cheap and abundant supplies of all the basic commodities would find the science and civilization of the world unable to utilize them? Have all our triumphs of research and organization bequeathed us only a new punishment: the Curse of Plenty? Are we really to believe that no better adjustment can be made between supply and demand? Yet the fact remains that every attempt has failed. Many various attempts have been made, from the extremes of Communism in Russia to the extremes of Capitalism in the United States. They include every form of fiscal policy and currency policy. But all have failed, and we have advanced little further in this quest than in barbaric times. Surely it is this mysterious crack and fissure at the basis of all our arrangements and apparatus upon which the keenest minds throughout the world should be concentrated.”
Evidently we’ve learned nothing since Churchill spoke. Isn’t it shameful—or just surprising—that since the proponents of “post-modern” economics restructured the U.S. economy around the concept of a deregulated financial sector over the past 30 years, income and wealth disparities between rich and poor have become much worse?
Perhaps we are finally ready to reopen the question of whether human beings have a right to a sufficient income to keep body and soul together. This question has been mostly lost since President Ronald Reagan declared in his 1981 inaugural address that, “Government is not the solution to the problem; government is the problem.”
But it is only government that can authorize and implement what is today called a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG). Otherwise, if government is trapped in the ideological straightjacket Reagan and his fellow conservatives put it in, then the only possible paradigm is Social Darwinism—survival of the fittest. Today it is not difficult to see that implementation of a BIG, had it been put in place when the concept still had political life in the 1960s and early 1970s, would have gone a long way toward ameliorating human distress from poverty along with assuring a degree of economic justice. And we would clearly be much better off today.
The last serious efforts at a BIG were President Richard Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan, which passed the House but was defeated in the Senate in 1970, followed by implementation of the Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income families, enacted in 1975. Since then, every step toward economic “reform” has been one permutation or another of trickle-down economics, including the supply-side tax cuts of the Reagan and Bush II administrations.
Of course, the purpose of the move to deregulate the financial industry that has been going on for the past generation was supposed to have been to create a new “ownership” society based on having our money “work for us.” But the deregulated bubble economy has now blown up, exposed as the biggest fraud in history.
Yet even in the midst of massive government bailouts for the banks and the as-yet-to-be-implemented economic stimulus proposals for the people, a BIG is never mentioned, not even by progressives. One problem with BIG is that its proponents always presented it as a transfer-of-wealth program, where a portion of the earnings of people with earned incomes would be diverted to support those in need. Even the idea of diverting military expenditures to a BIG could be viewed as a transfer program, since a smaller war machine would mean a reduction of salary and benefit payments to military personnel and civilian contractors.
In other words, even those in favor of BIG have viewed it as a kind of charity. As such, it is likely safe to say that BIG has little, if any, chance to be implemented within the U.S. at any time in the foreseeable future, at least in an amount to have an impact.
But there are other ways to look at the problem. One way is that of the Social Credit movement, where a regular dividend payment to individuals is seen not only as fair but is viewed as a necessary balancing force within a developed economy. But Social Credit concepts, while once a force in the British Commonwealth nations, is virtually unknown in the U.S. Another way is shown by the Alaska Permanent Fund (APF), where residents enjoy by right a share of the resource wealth of the state.
Both Social Credit and the APF as models for action will be discussed in this paper. The paper focuses on the U.S., though the concepts are universally applicable, and proposes a method of providing a BIG as part of a program to rebuild the economy from the bottom up. I call this program, based on dividend-type approaches, a “Bailout for the People,” as opposed to the bank bailouts that are adding trillions of dollars to the national debt. I have presented it previously in articles on the internet as “The Cook Plan.” (Richard C. Cook, “How to Save the U.S. Economy,” Global Research, October 10, 2008)
Such a program is urgently needed. There is no time to waste in rescuing our citizens from the onrushing catastrophe that is befalling an economy where both manufacturing and family farming were long ago gutted to create today’s anemic service economy. If things continue to go as they are today, there could be U.S. citizens starving within a year, and Congress knows it.
A Historic Collapse
As the recession of 2008 deepens, with precipitous declines in employment, business activity, home appraisals, consumer confidence, and retail sales, it is evident that the U.S. and the world are facing the possibility of an economic collapse of Great Depression severity, or worse. Violent crime and stress-caused illnesses are increasing. Behind each statistic is a human being or family that suffers.
Amazingly, it took a full year of economic distress, from December 2007, when economic activity last peaked, to a conference call on November 28, 2008, for the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research to declare that a recession had actually been taking place during that period. As late as September 15, 2008, Republican presidential candidate John McCain said, “the fundamentals of our economy are strong,” a statement that repeated what President George W. Bush had been intoning ever since the housing bubble began its rapid deflation in 2006.
But even with the economists and politicians finally acknowledging reality—it was the recession that propelled Barack Obama to victory in November—the situation is actually worse than they say. A recession is defined as declining Gross Domestic Product. But there is a big difference between the type of GDP that represents transactions that do not add to the real productivity of the nation—as often happens with financial paperwork—and economic output that puts money in the pockets of consumers and workers.
If economic health is measured, for instance, by immediate consumer purchasing power, it is telling that M1—the money in cash and checking accounts—has been decreasing, when adjusted for inflation, since December 2003. That was five years ago! The decrease began soon after the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates following three years of cuts—over 500 basis points—that created the housing bubble in the first place.
With the recession now settling in, with the official unemployment rate approaching seven percent, and with the number of underemployed or no longer seeking work running at a similar rate, there has not been a greater need for a Basic Income Guarantee in the last generation. But the federal budget deficit has been added to significantly by Secretary of the Treasury Paulson’s $700 billion financial industry bailout, along with other loans and bailouts to rescue Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, insurance giant AIG, and additional emergency loans from the Federal Reserve under Chairman Ben Bernanke.
No one really has a handle on how much government money has been committed, though $4+ trillion is a reasonable guess. The size of the bailout compared to government spending for major projects in the past is shown in terrifying detail in the following graphic by www.voltagecreative.com/blog.
larger view
Still to come are any loans Congress or the Treasury will end up authorizing to save the auto industry and the costs of Obama’s economic stimulus package that may approach $1 trillion.
The severity of the crisis and the disastrous effects on working people are shown by the insistence by many politicians that rescue of the auto industry be dependent on the willingness of the United Auto Workers to agree to the gutting of their wage and benefit package. This, along with the huge number of layoffs in the financial industry, shows that even massive bailouts will not save the jobs or livelihoods of millions of people.
During the coming year the ratio of the federal deficit to GDP, which peaked at 125% in 1945, will likely exceed that record amount. The difference is that at the end of World War II American consumers enjoyed a high rate of savings because of fulltime employment due to wartime spending, combined with a dearth of consumer goods. After the war, these savings became available for economic growth that paid down the national debt. Today, consumer savings are virtually non-existent. And there is no assurance that more spending will achieve anything like the full employment of the World War II era.
So the nation is in uncharted territory, a scenario that is being repeated around the world with growing poverty, the decline of economic growth, and imposition of austerities by the International Monetary Fund. Under such circumstances, a Basic Income Guarantee, were anyone to consider it, cannot be a simple transfer program, as described above, where those still with money are required to share a significant portion of it with those who don’t have it. Rather new methods of funding must be found.
The Failure of Economics
So what is really wrong with the economy? Some say the housing bubble is to blame, where the banks made credit so easy to get that the prices of homes inflated beyond their real value. Others blame it on the “toxic debt” from subprime mortgages that investment banks packaged and sold to unwary investors. Others blame the unregulated U.S. financial system that generated huge amounts of speculative investments, accomplished through bank leveraging, that now have gone sour.
Here’s what economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote recently in Vanity Fair:
“Of course, the current problems with our financial system are not solely the result of bad lending. The banks have made mega-bets with one another through complicated instruments such as derivatives, credit-default swaps, and so forth. With these, one party pays another if certain events happen—for instance, if Bear Stearns goes bankrupt, or if the dollar soars. These instruments were originally created to help manage risk, but they can also be used to gamble. Thus, if you felt confident that the dollar was going to fall, you could make a big bet accordingly, and if the dollar indeed fell, your profits would soar. The problem is that, with this complicated intertwining of bets of great magnitude, no one could be sure of the financial position of anyone else—or even of one’s own position. Not surprisingly, the credit markets froze.”
Stiglitz is a former World Bank economist, winner of the Nobel Prize, and now a noted critic of the world financial system. But what is puzzling, besides the fact that Stiglitz buys into the basic validity of the world’s debt-based monetary system, is his apparent failure to recognize the role of collapsing consumer purchasing power as a principal cause of the freezing of the markets.
Individuals can no longer get loans because they can’t afford to repay them. Businesses can’t get loans because consumer income is insufficient to buy their products. Within the U.S., consumer purchasing power has fallen not only because of the export of so many manufacturing jobs to low-paying overseas labor markets like those in China, but also because workers have not shared in the benefits of constantly rising productivity. See the following chart from www.Heritage.org that compares growth in productivity to median household income over almost 40 years:
larger view
As stated, for commentators like Stiglitz, or like Paul Krugman, another Nobel Prize winner who writes for the New York Times, the debt-based monetary system run by the banks is a “given” as the unchallenged centerpiece of the world economy.
Here is Krugman’s prescription from a November 18, 2008, column:
“What the world needs right now is a rescue operation. The global credit system is in a state of paralysis, and a global slump is building momentum as I write this. Reform of the weaknesses that made this crisis possible is essential, but it can wait a little while. First, we need to deal with the clear and present danger. To do this, policymakers around the world need to do two things: get credit flowing again and prop up spending.”
But even as Krugman and others argue for more government spending to prime the economic pump and restore employment—a few more trillion added to the national debt can’t hurt, they say—such spending can only take place through deficit financing funneled through the banking system. So their answer to a crisis marked by overwhelming public and private debt is more debt. Some call this “Keynesian economics,” and as Richard Nixon famously said way back in 1971, “We are all Keynesians now.”
The problem is that the world has changed radically since John Maynard Keynes wrote in the 1930s at a time when the banking system had discredited itself with the economic collapse that started the Great Depression. Then, the banks were contracting the currency and causing a liquidity shortage. But they were brought to heel by the federal government under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. To get things moving again, the government ran its own low-cost credit programs through agencies like the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. And while the government borrowed for job-creation programs like the WPA and CCC, business and household debt weren’t even close to what they are today.
What has happened since then is that the full-employment industrial state that was brought into existence by the New Deal and World War II, and which produced so much wealth that a BIG—then defined as a negative income tax—actually was taken seriously as a matter of discussion in the 1960s, no longer exists. Instead of the industrial state, we have what could be called the international empire of usury.
By the late 1960s the industrial state was in decline. The key event took place in 1971 when Nixon removed the gold peg from the dollar and world currencies began to float. From that point on, credit became separated from production, and people began to look to paper profits through currency, resource, and asset speculation as the source of wealth.
Also during the 1970s, the U.S. government worked with OPEC to bring about radical increases in petroleum prices. The flood of “petrodollars” which resulted financed the growing U.S. trade and fiscal deficits and caused a sharp rise in inflation. When the Federal Reserve under Paul Volcker began to attack the inflation with interest rates that would exceed 20 percent, the worst recession since the Great Depression followed. The recession lasted from 1979-83 and wrecked the U.S. industrial economy. Never before in U.S. history had the financiers wielded such dictatorial—and destructive—power.
The last straw came when the financial industry began to be deregulated to take advantage of the orgy of greed that had been made possible by government policy. Accordingly, every period of economic growth since the 1980s has been a financial bubble, including the merger-acquisition bubble of the Reagan/Bush I years, the dot.com bubble of the 1990s, and the housing/equity/derivative bubble of the 2000s.
During this time, the U.S. became one of the most grievously mismanaged nations in history, with every president since Reagan making their own contributions to the madness. The loss of manufacturing jobs that started with the Volcker recession accelerated under President Bill Clinton, who signed NAFTA and gave China most-favored-nation status. Economists like Stiglitz and Krugman, not to mention those who cling to the myth that what we have today is really free-market economics, fail to recognize the tremendous sea change that has made the U.S. economy dysfunctional to its roots. This means that none of their solutions can solve the problem.
Let me also observe, with respect to the tender concern that economists have that the credit markets get up and running again, doesn’t this also illustrate the human tendency to “kiss the whip that scourges”?
The financial system holds everyone hostage, including citizens, politicians, and economists too. A good analogy might be “Stockholm Syndrome,” where, according to Yahoo.com:
“Captives begin to identify with their captors initially as a defensive mechanism, out of fear of violence. Small acts of kindness by the captor are magnified, since finding perspective in a hostage situation is by definition impossible. Rescue attempts are also seen as a threat, since it’s likely the captive would be injured during such attempts.”
Cancer
There is not a single academic or popular economist writing today who admits that the international empire of usury we have been watching collapse is a qualitatively different phenomenon from anything seen before and that it has nothing to do with any of the concepts we are so familiar with such as democracy, economics, or even capitalism. A better concept might be one drawn from medicine—what we are seeing is a rapidly metastasizing case of terminal cancer. The host of this cancer is the population of the U.S., and the cancer of debt is deadly. The progressive prescriptions of people like Stiglitz and Krugman, and even those of president-elect Barack Obama, are like offering a pair of crutches to a cancer patient so ill he can no longer even stand up.
The international empire of usury has a long pedigree. It goes back to ancient Sumeria, when debtors first began to be sold into slavery. Excessive debt ruined many of the Greek city-states and helped wreck the Roman Empire. During the Middle Ages, usury was such a scourge that the Catholic Church outlawed it.
The current phase of the empire dates to the creation of the Bank of England, which was a privately-owned banking institution that made its money by lending to the British government so it could fight its wars. The Bank of England was cloned on American soil when the Federal Reserve System was created by Congress in 1913. The bankers had previously tried take control of the U.S. through the First and Second Banks of the United States but had been defeated by democratic forces led initially by Thomas Jefferson.
Since the founding of the nation, there has been a struggle within the U.S. between pro-and anti-bank forces. The banks finally saw complete triumph in the 1970s when the philosophy of monetarism took over and assured that a chronic insufficiency of real money in the economy would be answered by an exponentially growing amount of bank-generated debt. Monetarism was not directed solely by figures within the U.S. Rather it was part of a worldwide financier conspiracy. The “Reagan Revolution” which facilitated it was matched by “Thatcherism” in the U.K. and similar regimes around the world.
Since American economists have failed so egregiously, we are forced to turn elsewhere for explanations. The triumph of usury—i.e., cancer—was ably described by New Zealand author Les Hunter in his 2002 book, Courage to Change: A Case for Monetary Reform.
“It was the artificial scarcity of money imposed by the application of monetarist policies that caused the usurious system to mutate from the industrial and allowed the collection of usury in amounts greater than that forthcoming as industrial economic rent. What has come to be practiced is a corruption of the investment practices that, in the past, and particularly in the industrial systems, had driven civilization forward.
“As investment proceeds within a usurious system, debt securities are accumulated and valued by the holders as income-earning assets. Of course, unlike the industrial assets such as the powered machine, a debt security produces nothing that is real.
“However, monetary income received as interest from compounding debt does give claim on current output—wealth at the point of sale—as does any form of economic rent once it has been collected in a monetized economy. Within usurious society, the rich are made richer and the poor, poorer, for no justifiable reason.”
How did this come about? Hunter writes in terms similar to those I used previously:
In the late 1960s, an aberrant socio-economic phase emerged: the usurious state, in which the control over money, rather than the ownership of machinery, is the most important lever of economic and social power. Investment in debt, and the speculative buying and selling of paper assets, are the most significant means of accumulating personal wealth.
Hunter provides the following list of characteristics of usurious systems, features that are agonizingly familiar:
Crushing debt; A widening gap between rich and poor; Share markets subject to collapse; Currency meltdowns; Mounting social distress; A pervading belief that the free market should be allowed free reign; Banks driven by profit but holding tremendous power through their ability to create and extinguish the national currency, that is, money. Hunter’s analysis is light-years ahead of U.S. economists, who, even when playing the role of an “official” opposition, really only enable the international financial elite to continue their looting unabated. Of course industrial society is at the mercy of the financial predators, because large quantities of money are needed for the economy to function. Hunter continues:
“The accumulation of usurious debt—money-lenders’ assets—became possible because those in business have an absolute requirement for access to sufficient working funds to pay costs. (The payment of costs is the main means of generating the national income; investment makes up the difference.)
“The money needed as working funds is defined as M1, which is the sum of base-metal coin, notes, and cheque money. It is this money that is accepted as the national currency. In many nations, applying monetarist policy has given business’s working funds—as the ancillary factor of production—sufficient scarcity value that significant amounts of usury, as the relevant form of economic rent, can be, and are being, collected.
Monetarism rests on one basic lie—that higher interest rates slow inflation. Actually higher rates kill economic activity. This is not slowing inflation; it is wrecking human life. In the long run, higher rates add to inflation by increasing the proportion of costs that go to pay interest. This system is not free enterprise, and it is not capitalism. It is a cancer that destroying the world.
Revolution
The bankers’ takeover of the world economy that began in earnest in the 1970s cannot be undone by Barack Obama’s economic stimulus program or any other progressive nostrums. Thus, the goal of creating up to five million new jobs is not likely to succeed, simply due to the enormous amount of debt the productive economy is currently carrying.
The amount of debt is staggering. If we count individual, household, business, and government debt, that figure now exceeds $40 trillion, including the recent bailouts. What the General Accounting Office calls “unfunded liabilities” of the federal government, due to future costs of entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, adds another $60 trillion. This doesn’t include outstanding debt for derivatives, most of it bank-leveraged, which, according to the Bank for International Settlements, may amount to $1.28 quadrillion worldwide.
Growth in debt through 2006—understated, compared to figures derived by independent analysts—is shown by the following chart based on Federal Reserve figures. Note that virtually all of the debt has been incurred since removal of the gold peg and that its growth is exponential.
larger view
The economic geniuses who write for newspapers like the Washington Post or give advice to the Federal Reserve have come up with solutions like slashing Social Security and Medicare benefits or selling more U.S. assets to creditor nations like China. They refuse to propose the obvious, which is that the debt must be written off as soon as possible and the monetary system changed to prevent further debt to be accumulated. Nor do they realize that debt; i.e., credit, should be viewed solely as a means of generating working capital, not a permanent millstone around the neck of humanity.
To overcome today’s tragedy requires a political revolution to remove the bankers from power. Today they control the political process in the U.S. and around the world. They control the powerful intelligence agencies of the Western nations. They control international agencies such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization. They also control the Western military machine, with NATO now being sworn to protect Western “neoliberalism,” which means the bankers’ empire.
The only U.S. political figure who has called for revolution is Dr. Ron Paul, Republican candidate for the 2008 presidential nomination and author of legislation to abolish the Federal Reserve. In the opinion of this writer, the only people who have a right to speak of “change” in today’s political and economic environment—including Nobel laureates—are those who support this revolution. There is no other way to fight the unlawful takeover of power by the financiers.
Of course it’s not only politicians, pundits, and economists who have failed. We are all responsible for our own lives and actions. If the American people wanted a just economic system and were willing to do what was necessary to get it, they could have it—now.
What Must be Done
Approximately 20-30 percent of the people in the developed world are doing just fine financially. They are either professionals, technical experts who are indispensable in making the world economy function, former government employees on pensions, or a small minority who live off compound interest—i.e., the bankers and their dependents. Most of this 20-30 percent, particularly the latter group, do not seem to have a great deal of compassion for the majority within their own nations and even less for the billions of underprivileged people around the world.
For the remaining 70-80 percent who realize, with the recession now having arrived, that their livelihoods are on a slippery slope downward, possibly taking them toward personal and family catastrophe, they need only one thing—MONEY!
For many of these it would be nice to have a job, or a better job. But jobs are not the answer, even though any time a politician, economist, activist, or commentator offers an opinion on how to improve the economy they say MORE JOBS!
And they are completely wrong.
The way to generate income security is not to give someone a job. It is to give them money. If we began with this simple fact the economy would soon generate far more jobs than people could fill. Of course some of these jobs would be low-paying or even volunteer jobs, which would be acceptable provided that people still had enough to live on and had opportunities to earn more.
For the world economy to function and for there to be enough produced to support everyone at a decent standard of living, not everyone has to work. In fact too many workers get in each other’s way. In 2007 world GDP was $55 trillion. The population was 6.6 billion. Per capita that’s $8,300. It’s not a large sum, but in many countries the cost of living is far lower than in the developed nations of the West.
The productivity of a modern industrial economy is phenomenal. It surpasses the wildest dreams of generations past. The problem today is not a shortage of goods and services. It is too many goods and services. There is a worldwide glut of automobiles. The same goes for many other products such as clothing, CD players, TVs, and most consumer products. This does not mean that threats like climate change or resource depletion should be ignored. The reason these threats are not being faced is that industry must work so hard to cut costs and keep prices down in the face of the catastrophic shortage of consumer purchasing power.
So why do we need more jobs? Only because we are too cheap and so poorly informed that we fail to realize that a cash payment to everyone, at least at a subsistence level, should be viewed as a dividend. It’s something everyone should receive as the benefit of our incredible producing economy. It should be treated as a HUMAN RIGHT.
The situation does not require that someone else should be taxed in order for that dividend to be provided. This is not a transfer payment. It is not a share-the-wealth scheme. It is the acknowledgment by the economic system that the universe is bountiful and abundant. Modern industry has tapped into that abundance. Today the abundance is being stolen by the bankers and their debt-based monetary system. This is what must be taken back by, and on behalf of, “We the People.”
If you want to read the history of dividend-economics, study the history of the worldwide Social Credit movement. I am not going to repeat that history here. I have written about it in many articles over the past two years, most of which can be found at www.GlobalResearch.ca. It’s one of the basic themes in my new book, We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform (Tendril Press, 2008). You can find a lot of information about Social Credit on the internet, including the website for the Michael Journal in Canada at www.michaeljournal.org.
One of the world’s leading experts on Social Credit is Wallace Klinck of Alberta, Canada, who provides the following commentary on the crisis:
“The base cause of our essential economic, and social, afflictions is…a fundamental and widening disparity between effective consumer income and financial prices—resulting essentially from a basic flaw in national financial cost accountancy involving a premature withdrawal of credit because of added allocated capital charges in consumer prices. The consequent widening deficiency of effective purchasing-power forces the consuming public increasingly into dependency upon debt.
“We are now witnessing the inevitable, entirely predictable, and devastating results of such folly (or more likely, high policy). Governments are forced to make a futile attempt to ameliorate this problem by assuming debt to compensate or accommodate the ballooning private debt. I am sure that the financial powers look on with almost puzzled amusement as we engage in a sterile debate about the evils of interest and usury when we obviously have no strategy to deal with the rapid expansion of debt upon which interest is demanded. We waste our energy on a misguided and sterile debate while ignoring the fact that the consumer is charged with capital depreciation but not credited with capital appreciation.
“In other words, we blindly forgo our inheritance for a mess of pottage. You only pay interest on debt—eliminate debt and you have effectively eliminated any tribute of interest or ‘usury.’ There should be no need for any overall national consumer debt at all—consumers in aggregate should always be provided sufficient income to purchase the entire final product of industry without resorting to borrowing. The physical cost of production has been provided in full when goods are completed, and the financial means to liquidate the financial costs of that production should be made fully available as each ‘cycle’ of production is completed.
“Whatever the costs to industry, including interest or service charges, the consumer should always be in a position to liquidate them with his or her financial income. Being increasingly inadequate under the orthodox system of financial accountancy, that consumer income must be supplemented from a source which originates outside the price-system and does not, therefore, create new financial costs through its issue. The mechanisms to achieve this condition recommended by Social Credit are the payment to all citizens of a National Dividend and to all retailers a compensatory payment in order to effect a falling price-level, i.e., a Compensated Price.
“When the expenditure of human labor is being rapidly replaced by other factors of production, as it is in a most spectacular manner, talk of there being ‘no free lunch’ is entirely irrational from the standpoint of reason, downright sacrilegious from a theological standpoint, absolutely disastrous from an economic and social perspective—and absurd from a philosophical aspect.”
I strongly recommend that readers try to understand and absorb what Mr. Klinck is saying. He is explaining why everyone doesn’t have to work all the time for us to enjoy a decent standard of living. People in the U.S. understood this in the 1950s, when a single breadwinner could support a family. Does anyone wonder why conditions have changed so much for the worse since then? In a private message to me dated December 13, 2008, Mr. Klinck made the following observations on jobs vs. income:
“I find it quite maddening that we have these recent desperate appeals for industrial state ‘bailouts’ to help industry go on producing even more unsalable goods, when it should be quite obvious that what needs ‘subsidizing’ is consumption and not production. Of course, as we know from a Social Credit perspective, these appeals are based on a number of major misconceptions about national cost accounting, the purpose of industry, work, and life in general. I think that this erroneous and indelibly entrenched ‘moral’ mindset is our biggest obstacle. For instance, I heard extended appeals on television today from the Canadian Autoworker’s Union for protection of their ‘jobs’, etc. If only we could show them that it is their incomes and not their ‘jobs’ which should be preserved. They are so obsessed with ‘work’ that they are blinded to reality.”
We have another well-developed plan for monetary reform here in the United States with the American Monetary Act proposed by the American Monetary Institute. (www.monetary.org) This plan would eliminate public debt for federal government expenditures by returning to a Greenback-type system of direct government purchasing like we had during and after the Civil War. Public expenditures would focus on the creation of infrastructure assets as the basis for the monetary system. The American Monetary Act became part of the platform of Congressman Dennis Kucinich in his 2008 congressional campaign. The Act also contains a dividend provision.
Lessons from the Alaska Permanent Fund
We can find one small but extremely important example of dividend economics in the U.S. by examining the Alaska Permanent Fund which paid every resident of Alaska a dividend of $3,269 in 2008 out of state resource revenues. The APF was set up in 1976 when Alaska voters passed a constitutional amendment calling for a direct payment to individuals rather than turning the money over to the state bureaucracy for “social services.”
Today the Alaska Permanent Fund is a shining—and rare—example of economic democracy at work. At first the APF made dividends incremental based on a person’s years of residency, but the U.S. Supreme Court declared this provision unconstitutional. The Alaska legislature responded by providing equal dividends to all residents of six-months or more. The first dividend, amounting to $1,000, was paid on June 14, 1982.
The APF dividend is not a welfare payment. It is a resident’s fair share of the bounty of the Earth. There are no means tests, no lines to wait in, no bureaucrats snooping around to find out what someone used the money for. The APF has not ruined the character of those who get it. A millionaire receives the same payment as a person living in poverty. Spent into circulation, the money becomes part of the lifeblood of the community without having to be repaid and with no interest being charged. Deposited into banks, the money capitalizes consumer borrowing and economic growth.
In the Fall 2008 Newsletter of the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network there appeared an editorial on the Alaska Permanent Fund by Karl Widerquist, one of the leaders of the worldwide BIG movement, now a professor at Reading University in England. This editorial is reprinted as follows:
“EDITORIAL: The Alaska Dividend and the Presidential Election (The views expressed in this editorial are my own and do not represent the views of USBIG or its membership. -Karl Widerquist)
“Most people will be surprised to learn that the Republican vice-presidential nominee and the Democratic presidential nominee have both endorsed the Basic Income Guarantee. In one form or another both support policies to guarantee a small government-provided income for everyone. As reported in the USBIG Newsletter earlier this year, Obama has voiced support for reducing carbon emissions with the cap-and-dividend strategy, which includes a small BIG.
“Sarah Palin, like most Alaskan politicians, supports the Alaska Permanent Fund (APF). Existing rules caused the APF dividend to reach a new high of 2,069 this year. That much had nothing to do with Palin. But, whatever else you might think of her, she deserves credit for adding $1200 more to this year’s dividend.… She proposed it to the legislature, and pushed it through, resisting counter proposals to reduce the supplement to $1000 or $250.
“Most people who learned about Palin at the Republican National Convention in August would probably be surprised to learn that such a hard-line conservative supports handing out $16,345 checks to even the poorest families. Actually, families the size of Palin’s will receive $19,416—no conditions imposed besides residency, no judgments made.
“The support of politicians like Palin provides evidence against the belief that BIG is some kind of leftist utopian fantasy with no political viability. In the one place BIG exists it is one of the most popular government programs, and it is endorsed by people across the political spectrum.
“The APF has not become an issue in the campaign, and I doubt she has plans to introduce a similar plan at the national level, but when the issue has come up, Palin has taken credit for it as a conservative policy. In an interview on the Fox News network, Sean Hannity confirmed that Palin increased the Alaska dividend by $1200 this year. Hannity commented, ‘I have to move to Alaska. New York taxes are killing me.’
“Sounding like some kind of progressive-era land reformer, Palin replied, ‘What we’re doing up there is returning a share of resource development dollars back to the people who own the resources. And our constitution up there mandates that as you develop resources it’s to be for the maximum benefit of the people, not the corporations, not the government, but the people of Alaska.’
“Tim Graham, writing for the conservative website Newsbuster.com criticized NPR’s Terry Gross for asking questions that implied opposition to the APF in an interview with Alaska Public Broadcasting host, Michael Carey. Graham writes, ‘Gross walked Carey through the idea that it’s not hard for Palin to be popular in Alaska when she’s handing every family a $1200 check from all the oil business. She then elbowed Carey about how that money could have been better “invested” (as Obama would say) in government programs.’ Suddenly conservatives are ridiculing people they assume do not support unconditional grants.
“Palin justified a tax increase on the oil companies to support higher BIG on the PBS Now program before she was nominated for vice-president. ‘This is a big darn deal for Alaska. That non-renewable resource, of course, is so valuable …. And of course [the oil companies] they’re fighting us every step of the way when we say, “Well we wanna make sure, especially as it’s being sold for a premium, that we’re receiving appropriate value.” … The oil companies don’t own the resources. They have leases and the right to develop our resources for us. And we share a value, we’re partners there, because they do the producing for us. But we own the resources.’ …
“The lesson here is that the APF is a model ready for export. Readers of this newsletter will know that governments in places as diverse as Alberta, Brazil, Iraq, Libya, and Mongolia have recently thought seriously about imitating the Alaska model.
“Some might be tempted to think that the APF isn’t a true BIG and it isn’t motivated to help the poor. Not so: Jay Hammond, the Republican governor of Alaska who created the APF, came all the way to Washington, D.C., to speak at the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network conference in 2004. He told me that his intention was to create a BIG to help everyone—most especially the disadvantaged. If he had his way the APF fund would now be producing dividends four to eight times the current individual level of $2,069.
“Others might dismiss the Alaska model saying that it is a unique case because Alaska has so much oil wealth. Again, not so: Alaska ranks only sixth in U.S. states in terms of per capita GDP, with an average income just over $43,000 in 2006, more than $15,000 per year less than number-one Delaware, and only $6,000 per year ahead of the national average. Any other state or the federal government can afford to do what Alaska has done.
“Alaska has oil wealth; other states have mining, fishing, hydroelectric, or real estate wealth. Governments give away resources to corporations all the time. The U.S. government recently gave away a large chunk of the broadcast spectrum to HDTV broadcasters at no charge. Offshore oil drilling will soon be expanded on three coasts. Everyone who emits green house gases and other pollutants into the atmosphere takes something we all value and—so far—pays nothing.
“What was different about the Alaskan situation was that Jay Hammond was there to take advantage of the opportunity. With the Alaska model in place, it will be just a little easier for next person at the next opportunity.”
There have been other times in U.S. history when the government “gave away” wealth. An example was the Homestead Act of 1862 which opened the American heartland to settlement and helped create one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions. There was also a time when anyone who walked into a U.S. Mint could have their gold or silver stamped into coinage—free of charge.
So why isn’t a dividend like the one provided through the Alaska Permanent Fund paid to every U.S. resident or, for that matter, to every person in the world? Please don’t make up any phony “economic” answers to this question. The answer is obvious—everyone else is being cheated by the monetary system.
The “Cook Plan”
What I am modestly calling the “Cook Plan” is simply to pay each resident of the U.S. a dividend, by means of vouchers for the necessities of life, in the amount of $1,000 per month per capita starting immediately as our fair share of the resources of the Earth and the bounty of the modern industrial economy. The money would then be deposited in a new network of community savings banks to capitalize lending for consumers, small businesses, and family farming.
I am calling it the “Cook Plan” because I have been advocating such measures for almost two years, ever since I published my first article on the subject in April 2007 entitled: “An Emergency Program of Monetary Reform for the United States”. (See Global Research at http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=5494)
The dividend would total about $3.6 trillion, which, not by coincidence, is the amount of new debt U.S. residents must incur each year from banks simply to exist. That borrowing, of course, is on top of borrowing in past years, because most people do not entirely pay off old loans before taking out new ones. Debt in this country in recent years has been cumulative, with interest constantly compounding. The annual dividend I have proposed would bring a halt to this “grip of death,” as it has been termed by British author Michael Rowbotham in his book: The Grip of Death: A Study of Modern Money, Debt Slavery, and Destructive Economics.
Because we have all been brainwashed to believe that the only sources of government funding are through taxes or the national debt, it is difficult to believe that a dividend of $3.6 trillion could be paid to residents by other means. In fact it could, and it would not even require a fund to be set up like the Alaska Permanent Fund that is replenished by resource revenues. According to Social Credit theory, the dividend fund could be created sui generis; i.e., it could be created out of “nothing.”
And why not? John Maynard Keynes pointed out, and everyone realizes today, that the banking system does just this in creating money “out of thin air.” It’s what many people refer to as “printing money,” which the Federal Reserve is doing on a massive scale in bailing out the financial system. The banks that belong to the Federal Reserve use the purchase of Treasury debt as collateral, but the money itself is simply issued as credit. The trouble is we end up paying interest on it, which is why the interest on the national debt in the fiscal year 2009 budget totals more than $500 billion.
Issuance of credit is mis-defined as the private property of the banks. But as I point out in the “GAP Chart” at the end of my book We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform:
“The goal of a stable, democratic economic system is achieved by a correct definition of credit. Credit actually is the means of calling forth the productive potential of the people. By law it should be part of the public commons, not the private property of the banks, and treated as a utility like electricity, water, and clean air. Availability of credit should be a basic human right, part of ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’”
Today the banking system has a monopoly on credit which it has seized unlawfully from the government, where, under the U.S. Constitution, Congress alone, according to Article II, has the prerogative to “Coin money and regulate the value thereof.” There is no reason except bankers’ propaganda why the federal government, as authorized by Congress, could not issue credit through a citizens dividend, by direct government spending, or by other means such as loan guarantees or lending for infrastructure. This would be real economic democracy.
The “GAP” Chart is presented in its entirety as follows:
larger view
As I explain in the book:
“In order for people to be able to pay for a nation’s GDP, sufficient purchasing power must be generated. Purchasing power is what British economist John Maynard Keynes called ‘aggregate demand.’ But the income that is generated through wages, salaries, and dividends is never enough to consume the GDP, because a portion must be withheld (saved) as retained earnings for future investment. This is the ‘gap.’ The way society decides to fill the gap reflects whether it views itself as an empire, where the rich profit at the expense of the few, or a democracy, where all members of society have the opportunity to prosper. Under the imperial design, the ‘gap’ is viewed negatively and filled by bank lending at usurious rates of interest, foreign conquest, the economic growth imperative, aggressive trade policies, or inflation of the currency. But when, by contrast, the ‘gap’ is viewed as an opportunity to further democratic ideals, it can be monetized through public control of credit and issued as direct government spending, a citizens dividend, or low-cost credit. This monetization of savings reflects a definition of credit as a public utility, not the private property of the banks. Keynesian economics tries to compromise between the imperial and democratic ideals by using government debt to monetize savings, but this ultimately destroys the currency through bankruptcy or inflation. Today we are at a late stage of imperialistic monetary policies which have led to financial collapse. Democratic management of credit has been tried at various times in U.S. history with great success but never on a sufficient scale to transform the economy. It is now time to take decisive measures to replace the economics of empire with those of democracy.
Again, what this model does is show how we can monetize the productive potential of the nation that today is withheld by businesses from payout as wages, salaries, and dividends through the withholding of retained earnings. It is these retained earnings that the business will utilize later to renew its processes of production through investment. But while these funds are idle, their creative potential still exists. That potential is the “energy source” for new consumer purchasing power. It is real, though, like electricity, invisible until harnessed. The logic is similar to the explanations of Social Credit by Wally Klinck.
Under the “Cook Plan” the U.S. Treasury would issue the dividend against an account that represents the productive potential of the nation once the money is spent. The dividend would not be inflationary, because it would be matched by production of goods and services within the physical economy. In fact it would have far less tendency to inflate because it would not have bank interest charges added to it. And once created it would remain in circulation—or deposited as savings—because it would not have to go back to a bank to be canceled as loans now do. Savings would be an important part of the plan, because today citizens have completely lost the ability to save in the usury-based economy where cancellation of bank credit along with the interest charged sucks up all available cash from people’s pockets.
Under the “Cook Plan,” the dividend would be issued as vouchers as a temporary measure until the program caught on and it was clear the money would be spent responsibly. The vouchers would be redeemable at any location licensed to do business for necessities of life such as food, housing, transportation, clothing, communications, or business/home maintenance. In fact they could be used for most purchases except things like the lottery, alcohol, entertainment, etc.
Once received in transactions, providers would then deposit the vouchers in the community savings bank that had been set up in their locality. In order to maintain membership in the bank, providers would be required to keep a certain amount of money on deposit to capitalize lending by the bank within the community. Loans would be made available under the bank’s fractional reserve privileges and would be issued at low rates of interest, preferably no more than one percent plus a premium for default insurance, depending on the credit status of the borrower. Persons eligible for lending would include individuals, householders, students, small businesses, local manufacturing concerns, family farmers, etc.
It should be obvious that this system will completely transform and revitalize local economies in any nation where it is implemented. One of the worse features of today’s usury-based economy takes place when global businesses in league with the banks come into communities and destroy local businesses by underpricing them. Then these businesses extract all the liquidity from the community, where people usually are so cash-poor they buy with credit cards, and return only a fraction to the low-wage workers they employ.
The “Cook Plan,” with the direct injection of purchasing power into the community through vouchers, combined with a new system of low-cost credit, would transform this dire situation completely. It would allow people to live and prosper without dependence on credit cards, government job-creation programs, or government welfare bureaucracies. And it would allow a resurgence of volunteer activities and work at low-paying professions such as education and the arts.
It Must Be Done Now
Obviously it would take time—though not much time—to work out all the details of the program, as well as to explain how it would interface with monetary reform proposals like those of the American Monetary Institute or resource-based dividend systems like the Alaska Permanent Fund. But in principle, the “Cook Plan” is sound.
In any case, we cannot afford to wait. Conditions today are nearing an emergency. Thousands of people are losing their jobs every day as the recession turns into a monster. Something must be done that has never been done before. Let President Barack Obama implement his massive public works program to create jobs. Meanwhile, let the “Cook Plan” be implemented, a plan that draws on much of the wisdom that has been dormant in recent decades as the usury-based economy has suffocated the life out of the world’s economy. It is now time to put that wisdom to work. “We the People” deserve to live in freedom on this beautiful planet, no matter what the bankers say.
Wally Klinck sums it up in words that describe every “supply-side” scheme ever invented, of which the empire of usury is just another permutation:
“The so-called financial ‘crisis’ derives from a faulty financial price-system which generates consumer prices more rapidly than it distributes incomes, forcing consumers to rely increasingly on creation of new money issued as repayable debt in the form of bank loans. When liquidity becomes eroded to the point where borrowing can no longer be sustained, the whole financial edifice collapses like a deck of cards. The mass foreclosure which ensues reveals the confiscatory nature of the financial system, manifesting a tragedy of human effort.
“In a free society and rational economic system, producers should get their money from consumers. Subsidizing producers so that they can create more goods for which consumers lack income to purchase [i.e., supply-side economics] is lunacy. What is needed is enhancement of consumer income to balance aggregate purchasing power with aggregate prices in each cycle of production. This would place consumers in a position to determine the viability of producers. The physical cost of production is fully met as production progresses. There should be no aggregate need for consumer debt whatsoever.
“If society had followed the Social Credit policy of C. H. Douglas who advocated Consumer Dividends and Compensated Retail Prices instead of the Fabian Socialist social debt policy of the late economist John Maynard Keynes, none of the current madness would have occurred. We would be enjoying increasing prosperity with falling prices and increasing leisure as should be the case in any modern and civilized society.”
Copyright 2008 by Richard C. Cook
Richard C. Cook is a former U.S. federal government analyst, whose career included service with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury Department. His articles on economics, politics, and space policy have appeared in numerous websites and print magazines. His new book, We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform, can now be ordered for $19.95 from www.tendrilpress.com. He is the author of Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age, called by one reviewer, “the most important spaceflight book of the last twenty years.“ His website is www.richardccook.com. Comments or requests to be added to his mailing list or to purchase his special report on the 2008 election may be sent to EconomicSanity@gmail.com.
1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year by state governments. Verify at: http://tinyurl.com/zob77
2. $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens. Verify at: http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fisc...
3. $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens. Verify at: http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fisc...
4. $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English! Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPT...
5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies. Verify at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPT...
6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens. Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPT...
7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens. Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPT...
8. $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for Welfare & social services by the American taxpayers. Verify at: http://premium.cnn.com/TRANSCIPTS/061...
9. $200 Billion dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens. Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPT...
10. The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that's two and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens. In particular, their children, are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US . Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPT...
11. During the year of 2005 there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern Border also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroin and marijuana, crossed into the U. S from the Southern border. Verify at: Homeland Security Report: http://tinyurl.com/t9sht http://tinyurl.com/t9sht
12. The National policy Institute, estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an average cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period.' Verify at: http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.or...
14. 'The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One million sex crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States .' Verify at: http://www.drdsk.com/articleshtml
The total cost is a whopping $ 338.3 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR.
[Note: If you want to access the links below click on the video link above and access them through the information section accompanying the video.
Also I must credit the authors of this video for disclosing what most of us serious activists have known for quite a long while. The major "drug reform" organizations are becoming more of an impediment to Re-Legalization than a catalyst. All of these groups are primarily supported by Soros, Lewis and Sperling and the only solutions they support are incremental approaches such as Medical Marijuana and "Tax and Regulate" models. Only the MERP Model will destroy the cartels, the gangs and restore the liberties of the American People.]
Despite what the MPP (Marijuana Policy Project) video might suggest, Barack Obama does not support marijuana decrim.
On the subject of cannabis Barack Obama is weak and most certainly does not support marijuana decrim.
Support a politician in a day and age where 75%+ of voters support medical marijuana and he says, "I won't risk any political capital for it". Support that?
That's not worthy of our support or vote.
We are the majority, we know what is right, we demand it!
This video was in response to a series of videos by MPP that seemed to suggest that Barack Obama was near perfect on marijuana reform.
MPP has responded 7 months and 10,000 views of this video later. We were glad to see that they have at long last presented a more balanced video in response to this video. We were heard. MPP acknowledged our points about their coverage of candidate Barack Obama.
Send a message to Barack Obama that luke warm support and worrying about political capital is unacceptable on the issues of medical marijuana and decrim.
Music: PROSPECT HILL "SOE" http://myspace.com/prospecthill
No Cuffs for Cannabis !
Honors for this video (4) #3 - Most Discussed (Today) - Nonprofits & Activism #36 - Most Viewed (Today) - Nonprofits & Activism #27 - Top Favorites (Today) - Nonprofits & Activism #56 - Top Rated (Today) - Nonprofits & Activism
Proof of what I say is true about Obama not supporting marijuana decrim, for the nitwits that can't be bothered to look and find out for themselves.
Washington, DC: Senator Barack Obama's campaign backed away from statements made last week affirming the Senator's support for decriminalizing marijuana, after being confronted with inconsistencies in his past and present campaigns on the issue by the Washington Times.
A spokesman for Obama's campaign blamed confusion over the meaning of decriminalization for the inconsistencies, and said that while Obama does not support decriminalization, "we are sending far too many first-time, nonviolent drug users to prison for very long periods of time, and that we should rethink those laws."
For more information, please contact Allen St. Pierre, NORML Executive Director, at: allen@norml.org. Full text of the Washington Times article can be found at: http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/p...
Would Obama supporting marijuana reform help or hurt him in the election? Smart money says that the 80% that support medical marijuana would be a boon for his candidacy see this link for more info on how it would help his campaign! This is 2008 not 1980!
There have been many misinformation posts on Barack Obama and John McCain on H-1B and F-4 Visas. Bottom line American workers, you are royally screwed by both candidates.
John McCain wants to increase H-1B Visas. So does Barack Obama. Think either of them are putting U.S. workers first? Think again! Neither of them will even co-sponsor S.1035, the reforms for H-1B. L-1. Never even crosses their lips!
Nielsen replaces workers with H-1Bs from Tata Part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJAnZUB6zyE
Both McCain and Obama issue corporate lobbyist talking points that have no basis in economic reality, completely ignoring the brain drain for the United States. When U.S. workers. U.S. professionals become underemployed, labor arbitraged with all of that skill and talent sitting idle, America further inches towards third world status by refusing to invest in it’s people and build up expertise from it’s own citizenry.
Even worse, the F-4 Visa, is a dangerous agenda for it tries to turn our entire educational system into a glorified green card machine. Imagine what will happen if Americans are forced to compete to even gain entry into our education system against the world’s population. That is indeed was is proposed and both candidates endorse it. As usual, both candidates put U.S. citizens last. Both candidates endorse global labor arbitrage, make no mistake.
And towards the end of this report on yet another company replacing US workers with foreign guest workers, note how both campaigns endorse this idea, either directly or indirectly.
“Purposeful domestic resistance” would require military to “rapidly determine the parameters defining the legitimate use of military force inside the United States.”
Steve Watson & Paul Watson Infowars.net Tuesday, Dec 16, 2008
A recent report produced by the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Institute warns that the United States may experience massive civil unrest in the wake of a series of crises which it has termed “strategic shock.”
The report, titled Known Unknowns: Unconventional Strategic Shocks in Defense Strategy Development, also suggests that the military may have to be used to quell domestic disorder.
“Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security,” the report, authored by [Ret.] Lt. Col. Nathan Freir, reads.
“Deliberate employment of weapons of mass destruction or other catastrophic capabilities, unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters are all paths to disruptive domestic shock.” it continues.
“An American government and defense establishment lulled into complacency by a long-secure domestic order would be forced to rapidly divest some or most external security commitments in order to address rapidly expanding human insecurity at home…”
“Already predisposed to defer to the primacy of civilian authorities in instances of domestic security and divest all but the most extreme demands in areas like civil support and consequence management, DoD might be forced by circumstances to put its broad resources at the disposal of civil authorities to contain and reverse violent threats to domestic tranquility. Under the most extreme circumstances, this might include use of military force against hostile groups inside the United States.” Lt. Col. Freir concludes.
See Pages 31-32 (PDF) for quoted sections.
Freir is a Senior Fellow in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He joined the think tank in April 2008 after retiring from the U.S. Army after 20 years as a lieutenant colonel. In his role at CSIS he rubs shoulders with a whole host of globalist luminaries including Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and Richard Armitage.
Echoing recent comments made by Pentagon advisors, along with other notable figures such as Colin Powell and Joe Biden, Freir also warns that the incoming Obama administration should prepare for a “first term crisis” that could act as a catalyst for such unrest.
“The current administration confronted a game-changing ’strategic shock’ inside its first eight months in office,” the report reads. “The next administration would be well-advised to expect the same during the course of its first term. Indeed, the odds are very high against any of the challenges routinely at the top of the traditional defense agenda triggering the next watershed inside DoD [Department of Defense].”
We have recently highlighted plans to station thousands more U.S. troops inside America for purposes of “domestic security” from September 2011, an expansion of Northcom’s militarization of the country in preparation for potential civil unrest following a total economic collapse or a mass terror attack.
“The U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon officials,” reported the Washington Post last month.
In a September 8 Army Times article, Northcom announced that the first wave of the troop deployment, which was put in place on October 1st at Fort Stewart and at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, would be aimed at tackling “civil unrest and crowd control”.
After a controversy arose surrounding the admissions made in the Army Times article, Northcom retracted the claim but conceded that both lethal and non-lethal weaponry traditionally used in crowd control and riot situations would still be used in the field.
The increasing militarization of America is part of a long term agenda to abolish Constitutional rule and establish a “military form of government,” following a large scale terror attack or similar disaster, as Tommy Franks, the former commander of the military’s Central Command, alluded to in a November 2003 Cigar Aficionado piece.
Franks outlined the scenario by which martial law would be put in place, saying, “It means the potential of a weapon of mass destruction and a terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event somewhere in the Western world – it may be in the United States of America – that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event. Which in fact, then begins to unravel the fabric of our Constitution. Two steps, very, very important.”
In the short term, the domestic deployment of troops is likely aimed at combating likely civil unrest that will ensue after a complete economic collapse followed by a devastating period of hyperinflation.
This warning was again echoed a few days ago in a leaked internal memo from Citibank.
“The world is not going back to normal after the magnitude of what they have done. When the dust settles this will either work, and the money they have pushed into the system will feed through into an inflation shock,” wrote Tom Fitzpatrick, Citibank’s chief technical strategist.
The memo predicts “depression, civil disorder and possibly wars” as a fallout from an economic collapse that many say is on the horizon.
Naturally, the claim that such troop deployments are merely to aid in disaster relief efforts is a thin veil aimed at distracting from the real goal. Should a real tragedy occur, volunteers and already existing civil aid organizations are fully capable of dealing with such events, as we witnessed on 9/11.
The military are primarily trained to kill people and break things, and their role during the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts was mainly focused on detaining people in sports stadiums, shooting alleged looters and seizing guns from wealthy home owners in the high and dry areas, while real recovery measures were left to volunteers and local state authorities.
The open admission that U.S. troops will be involved in law enforcement operations as well as potentially using non-lethal weapons against American citizens is a complete violation of the Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act, which substantially limit the powers of the federal government to use the military for law enforcement unless under precise and extreme circumstances.
Section 1385 of the Posse Comitatus Act states, “Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”
Under the John Warner Defense Authorization Act, signed by President Bush on October 17, 2006, the law was changed to state, “The President may employ the armed forces to restore public order in any State of the United States the President determines hinders the execution of laws or deprives people of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law or opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.”
However, these changes were repealed in their entirety by HR 4986: National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008, reverting back to the original state of the Insurrection Act of 1807. Despite this repeal, President Bush attached a signing statement saying that he did not feel bound by the repeal. It remains to be seen whether President elect Obama will reverse Bush’s signing statement.
The original text of the Insurrection Act severely limits the power of the President to deploy troops within the United States.
For troops to be deployed, a condition has to exist that, “(1) So hinders the execution of the laws of that State, and of the United States within the State, that any part or class of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law, and the constituted authorities of that State are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity, or to give that protection; or (2) opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws. In any situation covered by clause (1), the State shall be considered to have denied the equal protection of the laws secured by the Constitution.”
Is the incoming Obama administration and Northcom waiting for such a scenario to unfold, an event that completely overwhelms state authorities, before unleashing the might of the U.S. Army against the American people?
[Ret.] Lt. Col. Freir’s Known Unknowns report addresses this specifically, stating:
“A whole host of long-standing defense conventions would be severely tested. Under these conditions and at their most violent extreme, civilian authorities, on advice of the defense establishment, would need to rapidly determine the parameters defining the legitimate use of military force inside the United States. Further still, the whole concept of conflict termination and/or transition to the primacy of civilian security institutions would be uncharted ground. DoD is already challenged by stabilization abroad. Imagine the challenges associated with doing so on a massive scale at home.”
The deployment of National Guard troops to aid law enforcement or for disaster relief purposes is legal under the authority of the governor of a state, but using active duty U.S. Army in law enforcement operations inside America absent the conditions described in the Insurrection Act is completely illegal.
The political left and right need to join forces and denounce this plan for what it is - another unconstitutional step towards the incremental implementation of martial law and the militarization of America.
Comment: About the only thing I disagree with is the notion that there is anything wrong with extending abortion rights. Women must definitely have a right to choose in such personal matter as these. But I do agree with Schafly on most other points. Obama is most definitely intent on perusing a Globalist agenda and that agenda is most definitely NOT in the interests of the American People.
When candidate Barack Obama declared himself a "citizen of the world" before thousands of cheering German socialists, and later pledged to "rejoin the world community," those weren't just his usual platitudes about "change." Those words sounded the trumpet for his specific and far-reaching globalist agenda.
Obama plans to use his presidential power to get the Democratic-majority Senate to ratify a series of treaties that would take us a long way toward global rule over our money, our laws, our military, our courts, our customs, our trade and even our use of energy. Here are the treaties he says he wants.
The U.N. Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), which Ronald Reagan rejected in 1982, is high on Obama's list. LOST has already created the International Seabed Authority (ISA) in Jamaica and given it total regulatory jurisdiction over all the world's oceans and all the riches on the ocean floor.
Corrupt foreign dictators dominate LOST's global bureaucracy, and the United States would have the same vote as Cuba. Likewise for LOST's International Tribunal in Hamburg, Germany, which has the power to decide all disputes.
Even worse, LOST gives the ISA the power to levy international taxes. The real purpose of the taxing power is to compel the United States to spend billions of private-enterprise dollars to mine the ocean floor and then let ISA bureaucrats transfer our wealth to socialist, anti-American nations.
Next on Obama's list is the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which was signed by Bill Clinton but rejected by the Senate in 1999. It would prohibit all nuclear explosive testing and thereby allow our nuclear arsenal to deteriorate until the American people are defenseless against rogue regimes such as Iran and North Korea.
A new Global Warming Treaty began to be written at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Poland in order to replace the Kyoto Agreement, which George W. Bush and our Senate refused to ratify. The new treaty would force dramatic reductions in our use of energy – i.e., our standard of living – and impose the "strong international norms" Obama seeks.
Obama is toadying to his feminist friends by pushing ratification of the U.N. Treaty on Women, known as CEDAW. It was signed by Jimmy Carter in 1980 and persistently promoted by Hillary Clinton, but the Senate has so far had the good judgment to refuse to ratify it.
This treaty would require us "to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women," to follow U.N. dictates about "family education," to revise our textbooks to conform to feminist ideology in order to ensure "the elimination of any stereotyped concept of the roles of men and women" and to set up a federal "network of child-care facilities."
Article 16 would require us to allow women "to decide number and spacing of their children." Everyone recognizes this as feminist jargon for a U.N. obligation to allow abortion on demand.
Like all U.N. treaties, the U.N. Treaty on Women creates a monitoring commission of so-called "experts" to ensure compliance. The monitors of the Treaty on Women have already singled out Mother's Day as a stereotype that must be eliminated.
Another U.N. Treaty on the list is the U.N. Treaty on the Rights of the Child, which was signed in 1995 by Bill Clinton but wisely never ratified by our Senate. This is a pet project of the people who believe that the "village" (i.e., the government or U.N. "experts") should raise children rather than their parents.
This treaty would give children rights against their parents and society to express their own views "freely in all matters," to receive information of all kinds through "media of the child's choice," to use their "own language," and to have the right to "rest and leisure." This treaty even orders our schools to teach respect for "the Charter of the United Nations."
These Obama-endorsed treaties, every one of which would be a dramatic encroachment on U.S. sovereignty, would be supplemented by trade agreements negotiated by Obama's trade representative, Ron Kirk. He is an enthusiastic supporter of the "global economic community" (which means open borders for "free" trade), of NAFTA and even of the NAFTA Superhighway, which he calls the "true river of trade between our communities."
Kirk's work to lock us into the global economy will be bolstered by Obama's secretary of commerce, Bill Richardson, another aggressive promoter of "free" trade.
Every U.N. treaty would interfere with self-government over some aspect of our lives and would transfer significant power to foreign bureaucrats, many of whom hate and envy America. Obama's U.N. treaties are the enemy of U.S. political and social independence, and Kirk's global economic community is the enemy of good middle-class American jobs.
Related special offer: "Trading Away Our Future" Whistleblower magazine: "HOW GLOBALISM IS DESTROYING THE U.S. ECONOMY" "The True Story of the Bilderberg Group" "Brotherhood of Darkness" "Hope of the Wicked"
We've all heard the laments: "My grandpa from Sicily learned English, and my grandma from Minsk got by without welfare. So what's the problem with immigrants today?"
As Mark Krikorian argues in this provocative book, what's different today is not the immigrants, but us. Today's immigrants are very similar to those of a century ago, but they are coming to a very different America -- one where changes in the economy, society, and government create fundamentally different incentives for newcomers. In other words, the America that our grandparents came to no longer exists. And this simple fact must become the new starting point for the explosive debate about immigration policy.
Krikorian argues that although mass immigration once served our national interests, in today's America it weakens our common national identity, limits opportunities for upward mobility, threatens our security and sovereignty, strains resources for social programs, and disrupts middle-class norms of behavior.
So as the politicians argue about border fences and amnesty, they are missing the bigger picture: the harmful impact of large-scale settlement of all kinds of immigrants, whether legal or illegal, skilled or unskilled, temporary or permanent, European or Latin or Asian or African. Modern America has simply outgrown immigration, and we must end it before it cripples us.
You can watch Krikorian discuss his book in this 1 hour lecture below:
This appearance of Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock occurred on my 15th birthday in 1969. This was apparently the closing act for the Woodstock event. My what a long strange trip it has been in the 39 years that have followed this historic concert.
The Disappearing Male is a CBC documentary about one of the most important, and least publicized, issues facing the human species: the toxic threat to the male reproductive system. The last few decades have seen steady and dramatic increases in the incidence of boys and young men suffering from genital deformities, low sperm count, sperm abnormalities and testicular cancer. At the same time, boys are now far more at risk of suffering from ADHD, autism, Tourette's syndrome, cerebral palsy, and dyslexia. The Disappearing Male takes a close and disturbing look at what many doctors and researchers now suspect are responsible for many of these problems: a class of common chemicals that are ubiquitous in our world. Found in everything from shampoo, sunglasses, meat and dairy products, carpet, cosmetics and baby bottles, they are called "hormone mimicking" or "endocrine disrupting" chemicals and they may be starting to damage the most basic building blocks of human development
I would highly recommend viewing the video "Inside Job." I find it to be a very sober accounting of the machinations of the "New World Order" which seriously challenges some of the faux "conspiracy theories" while preserving those policies which we must be most concerned. The first segment is viewable above. The rest can be viewed by double clicking on the video which will take you to the YouTube page. There you will find the other segments.
If you are interested in understanding the beginnings of Saudi Oil and Saudi Terrorism this Frontline presentation provides a great introduction. The other 6 parts can be viewed through the link (above).
A "Smoking" Merry Xmas from Karina I often feel somewhat jealous when a cute young lady can get 50 times the video hits, that I get. But this video is seasonal and cute. My only real criticism is that she does tend to waste a lot of that smoke. Would it not be hilarious to see Lisa Ling doing the same thing at the end of the next video?
This is Lisa Lings 1-hour piece on Marijuana that she did for National Geographic. While she is someone I'd definitely want to share a bowl with I am unsurprisingly unimpressed with this video. Like all comedies, documentaries and films about Marijuana it fails to look at the most obvious aspects -- the economics. If Marijuana were simply Re-Legalized under the MERP Model the DEA agents, featured within the videos, would be thankfully out of work. Marc Emory would not be facing extradition to the United States. The growers would go out of business. And that is exactly what needs to happen. But if Lisa Ling happens to read this, let it be known that I'm always available to present the economic arguments for Re-Legalization. Unfortunately the chances of that happening are about as small as Lings pert little chest.
Since I want ALL immigration into the United States Stopped it would just be inconsistent to exclude those immigrating from Islamic countries: like the 1,000 Iraqi's pouring into Michigan each month. But once you watch this film I have a feeling you will want an immediate end to Islamic Immigration into the US. I think it is time to circulate a petition. I don't want Dearborn to be the next Mumbai. I also want to stop the Mexican Drug Cartels such as the Zetas and M13. Unfortunately Obama is set to grant amnesty to 12-30 million Illegal Aliens and also wants to increase Legal Immigration from 1 to 1.5 million more each year. How can this asshole even think such a thing when 14 million Americans are out of work and we have lost nearly 1.5 Million American jobs in the first 10 months of 2008. Can we impeach him before the inauguration on January 20th, 2009? I'm quite confident that anyone watching this film will find it disturbing as they discover what Islam has in store for America. It is becoming less and less of a surprise with each passing day.
Karl Denninger summarizes the current situation regarding the "Trillion Dollar Corporate Bailout." While I don't necessarily agree with his solutions I do believe he has done a wonderful job explaining how Paulson's bailout is nothing short of the greatest robbery in US History. You can read more from Denninger at:
Is our government encouraging fraud an excessive risk? Stop the theft of your tax dollars now! "Call your Congressman and demand "no expenditure of public funds, of any kind, to stop what is going on with the housing market. That means no bailout bill that is going through Congress. It means no more stimulus checks. It means no more help for investment banks or commercial banks that have made millions and millions of dollars, nor the speculators that have made millions of dollars, nor those who have just bought a home at a bad time. It means not allowing the government to take the desperation of the "home flipper" who has bought 5 homes and is slowly drowning as his payments continue to escalate and turn it to the desperation of the government. Down that road lies great risk: a risk we cannot afford to take."
Pat Choate's new book, "Dangerous Business: The Risks of Globalization for America" is a must read book on the realities of globalization, trade, the lobbyists surrounding D.C., corporatism and China's modern mercantilism. Choate not only describes some of the corruption, insanity and erosion of the United States through bad trade deals, elitism and globalization, he prescribes solutions.
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The screenshot was taken on 12/20/2008 and I've preserved it because I will bet that he will bury this "skunky corpse" in a matter of days. Why? Because it illustrates that Obama has absolutely no intention of bending to the will of the American people. The screenshot shows that the most requested "change" that the American people want to see is the Re-Legalization of Marijuana.
We've all heard the laments: "My grandpa from Sicily learned English, and my grandma from Minsk got by without welfare. So what's the problem with immigrants today?"
Pat Choate's new book, "Dangerous Business: The Risks of Globalization for America" is a must read book on the realities of globalization, trade, the lobbyists surrounding D.C., corporatism and China's modern mercantilism. Choate not only describes some of the corruption, insanity and erosion of the United States through bad trade deals, elitism and globalization, he prescribes solutions.
