SOUNDS OF EVOLUTION


Thursday, February 5, 2009

THE TRIBE THAT CONTROLS AMERICA


The Tribe That Controls America
By Cochise Stronghold
2-6-9


Years ago, in the late 19th century, US troops launched punitive raids against native tribes in the far western states. We learn of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce, and the Lakota Sioux warrior chiefs, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. We learn of the legendary guerillas (or terrorists) Geronimo and Cochise. And we marvel at the courage, the resistance and the doomed efforts by these tribal leaders to preserve their way of life.

Nowadays, remnants of these tribes, Nez Perce, Lakota Sioux and Apache, survive in peace within the larger USA.

But suppose, one day, two native tribes went to war. Suppose Americans awoke one day and were overwhelmed by reports of an attack by the larger, more aggressive tribe on the lesser tribe. Wouldn't someone, anyone try to stop it?

Suppose US news reporters focused on the tremendous explosions, while avoiding any discussion of the reasons for the barbarity. But instead of condemning the attack, the entire US media strangely supported it.

Suppose, long before the attack, both Congress and the White House had designated the smaller tribe as terrorists. Suppose the Pentagon sent modern weapons to the superior tribe, weapons to eradicate the lesser tribe. Suppose, even, that disgruntled US taxpayers were required to fund this bloody tribal war with their tax dollars, despite taxpayer opposition. Suppose the warlike tribe so influenced US political, military and media leaders that no effective opposition could prevail.

Even more strange and unexplainable, the warlike tribe possessed a land area less than one percent of the greater USA. The warlike tribe also represented a tiny population almost wholly dependent on US foreign aid.

The warlike tribe then lobbied US Congressional leaders to vote on a resolution. Suddenly the US House of Representatives sprung into nervous action (So unlike Congress otherwise) and voted 399 to 6 to wholly support the warlike tribe's invasion of the lesser tribe's tiny reservation. Likewise the US Senate sprung into action (So unlike the Senate) to support the warlike tribe's invasion too.

So the warlike tribe attacked the primitive reservation. For three weeks the tiny enclave under bombardment suffered terribly and heart-rending photos recorded the suffering. None of these photos were permitted to be seen in the US media, since the warlike tribe prevented it. Indeed, the warrior leaders, the true leaders of America, prohibited the US media from eyewitness reports that might sway people to condemn the attack.





The warlike tribe boasted of their control. One tribal chieftain even bragged: "You know very well, and the stupid Americans know equally well, that we control their government, irrespective of who sits in the White House. You see, I know it and you know it that no American president can be in a position to challenge us even if we do the unthinkable. What can they (Americans) do to us? We control Congress, we control the media, we control show biz, and we control everything in America. In America you can criticize God, but you can't criticize us."

And the warrior chieftain was right.

If anyone in the USA dared to criticize the warlike tribe, a vast clique of tribal members in the media accused the critics of somehow being "Anti-tribal." No one wanted to be accused of being Anti-tribal. No politician dared being thought of as Anti-tribal, for fear of losing votes, even though tribal members living in the USA comprised such a tiny minority of voters. When thoughtful critics explained that BOTH tribes shared the same common ancestry, these critics-many of them fellow tribesmen---were shouted down, slandered, threatened or fired from their jobs.

We are victims, claimed the chosen warlike tribe. How can you judge us as being warlike, they said, when your own scorched earth policy killed men, women and children for centuries? Before you judge us, study your own history, said the warlike tribe.

After several weeks of destruction, having destroyed office buildings, banks, schools, hospitals, farms, orchards and wells with very little resistance, the warlike tribe withdrew from the smaller reservation. The leaders of the larger USA, nearly one hundred times larger, rather than condemn the victors, actually blamed the vanquished.

One tribal chief even boasted: "Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on us. We control America, and the Americans know it."

In a way, the warlike tribe chieftain was right. America, presently the biggest warlike nation in the world, was founded on bloodshed and eradication. Once the lesser tribes were eliminated, then suddenly sanctimony and hand-wringing became popular.

War always unites tribe against tribe, down through the centuries until some peace, or the elimination of competitive tribes, is achieved. After all, one million Iraqi dead tribesmen would certainly agree. The warlike tribe controls America, whether in Gaza or Washington DC.

LITROENERGY MICRO PARTICLES GLOW FOR 12 YEARS


MPK is a glow-in-the-dark paint company that has recently announced a new product -- Litroenergy. It's made of self-luminous micro-particles that are cheap, non-toxic, and will keep a glow for over 12 years. They never need to be exposed to the sun or recharged in any way, they just glow like hell. The material can be injection molded or added to paint and can glow in any color desired. "The light is said to be equivalent to a 20 watt incandescent bulb" and the cost of a glowing 8 x 12" object is about $0.35. Awesome! I love green technology and I love this stuff. It's going to be all over the place in no time. And by "all over the place" I mean "all over my genitals", because they're hard to find sometimes.

New Light Glows For 12 Years [treehugger]

THE HYPERDIMENSIONAL ELECTION OF BARACK OBAMA & 2012

EXAMINING THE FANTASY OF 24'S JACK BAUER


[Op-Ed] Examining the Fantasy of 24’s Jack Bauer: ‘Clip the Electrodes to His Balls and Turn on the Juice’

via AlterNet

Credit where credit is due. The TV show “24″ is probably the most significant piece of political drama in the last decade. jackbauer-tm

On one hand, it is very likely that Barack Obama got elected because America had already had a serious black presidential candidate (one season) and two black presidents (one season each). And he was always the most decent guy in the room. Often, the only decent guy in the room. Just like Obama.

On the other hand, there’s torture.

* Terrorists are going to nuke Los Angeles in three hours.

* Agent Jack Bauer has a suspect who knows where the bomb is.

* If Jack Bauer tortures the suspect, he can force him to say where it is, get there in 2 hours and 59 minutes, stop the bomb, and save 10 million people.

* What should, what must, Jack Bauer do?

That’s a no-brainer. Clip the electrodes to his balls and turn on the juice.

I don’t know how many people have actually watched “24,” but there’s not a person in America who is not familiar with the “ticking-bomb scenario.” It sounds so darn logical that it’s hard not to buy into it. A remarkable number of people have.

Dick Cheney and Michael Chertoff (ex-head of Homeland Security) are big fans. They thought that they were directing real-life Jack Bauers.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said a Jack Bauer should not be prosecuted, because “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. … He saved hundreds of thousands of lives.”

If he were prosecuted, Alan Dershowitz has already laid out the defense!

As drama, the ticking bomb is thrilling. “24″ is the “Perils of Pauline” on crack.

In reality, it is a pernicious and deceitful fantasy.

The reference point is, of course, 9/11. Before that day, we were soft and naïve. If only we had tortured someone, we could have stopped it. And saved American lives! That, of course, is utterly false.

We had quite enough information to have prevented 9/11. It had been gathered through normal and legal police and intelligence methods. It was not used due to bureaucratic infighting, ineptitude, incompetence, excess secrecy, and, most of all, the willful and pointed disregard of that information by Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush.

Now, we’re smart and tough. We do torture light and outsource the really evil stuff. Has it worked?

In October 2001, the FBI put out a Most Wanted Terrorists list. It had 22 names on it. As of 2006, 17 of them were still at large. Including Osama bin Laden. Mullah Omar wasn’t on the list. But he’s the other guy we invaded Afghanistan to get. He’s still around and actively leading the Taliban.

Yeah, well, I bet going “to the dark side” stopped a bunch of terrorist attacks.

No.

None that we know of.

Yeah, of course not. When our secret intelligence services secretly foil a secret terrorist plot, it’s gotta be secret! National effin’ Security! Period. Dot. Exclamation point! End quote!

No.

The Bush administration trumpeted every arrest, capture or kill they ever made:

The Lackawanna Seven
The Sears Tower Plot
The Shoe Bomber
Jose Padilla, who was going to use a “dirty bomb.”
Each and every one of them sounded like a job for Jack Bauer when they were first announced. Then, somehow, all the “terrorists” they caught turned out to be inept losers. The terror plots turned out to be bull sessions, attempts to buy weapons from FBI agents or visits to Afghanistan long before 9/11.

Bush was even willing to disrupt a two-year, 600-man, British terrorism investigation in order to get a good headline before the 2006 election. The result was that “the mastermind” escaped after he was arrested, and the prosecution of the plotters fell apart due to lack of evidence.

If there had been a real plot and these guys had actually stopped it, they would not have kept it secret, they would have made John McCain campaign commercials out of it.

Here’s a real life ticking-bomb scenario: It’s 1943. A German soldier has been captured.

We have a lot of people in captivity today, in Guantanamo, in Iraqi prisons, in secret CIA prisons around the world and prisons run by other countries. It has been amply demonstrated that many of the people in captivity are not “terrorists.”

But back in World War II, when we captured that German, we could be dead sure certain that he was an actual enemy. He was part of an organization planning to kill Americans in the immediate future. Within hours or, at most, days. We could be certain that they had lots of weapons of mass destruction. And factories that were making more.

He represented a country that committed war crimes, crimes against humanity and that had mistreated POWs and civilians in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

So let’s torture the mutha-fuggin’ Nazi pig-plugger! That’s a no-brainer, right?

Apparently not.

He refuses to give more than his name, rank and service number. We say OK and accept our obligation to feed and cloth him, give him medical attention, allow him to follow his religion, read books and even have access to a musical instrument if that is his inclination.

Why don’t we torture him?

It has been against American policy since George Washington fought the British. It is illegal under the Geneva Conventions, to which we were signatory back before WW II. We accepted those standards, even though the enemy did not live up to them.

According to Army Field Manual FM 34-52 — Intelligence Interrogation, torture does not produce reliable information. How do they know?

Experience indicates that the use of prohibited techniques is not necessary to gain the cooperation of interrogation sources. Use of torture and other illegal methods is a poor technique that yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts and can induce the source to say what he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.

FM 34-52, 1987.

Clearly they tried it, probably quite often, and it failed.

Revelation of use of torture by U.S. personnel will bring discredit upon the U.S. and its armed forces while undermining domestic and international support for the war effort. It also may place U.S. and allied personnel in enemy hands at greater risk of abuse by their captors. Conversely, knowing the enemy has abused U.S. and allied [prisoners of war] does not justify using methods of interrogation specifically prohibited by [international law] and U.S. policy.

FM 34-52, 1987

Most of all, what we were fighting for, and fighting as, was to be a country that is committed to the dignity of the individual, even an enemy, and to the rule of law, even in difficult circumstances.

OK, time for a different movie. “Judgment at Nuremburg” (1961). It has all-star cast, including: Burt Lancaster, Spencer Tracy, Maximilian Schell, Montgomery Clift, Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich and Richard Widmark. It’s based on a real trial. The men being prosecuted are very interesting.

They didn’t run the death camps, plan the Final Solution, run wars of aggression or even fill the top ranks of the Nazi Party. They were judges. Men who simply put the legal veneer on the laws of genocide and oppression, which were national policy.

It is hard to say that today’s terrorists are either more evil or more fearsome than the Nazis and Wehrmacht. Yet these men were kept in decent condition and had real trials. They could meet with their attorneys, confront their accusers and all the rest.

Burt Lancaster plays a judge who, before the Nazis, had been a highly esteemed jurist, an internationally recognized scholar of the law. He explains how he came to be a functionary of the Nazi regime.

Above all, there was fear. Fear of today, fear of tomorrow, fear of our neighbors, fear of ourselves. … There are devils among us. … Once the devils will be destroyed, your miseries will be destroyed. … What about those of us who knew better? We who knew the words were lies and worse than lies? Why did we sit silent? Why did we take part? Because we loved our country! What difference does it make if a few political extremists lose their rights?
What difference does it make if a few racial minorities lose their rights?”

It is a perfect description of the American mentality after 9/11. It is a perfect description of the fantasy represented by “24.”

The impulse to torture, and excuses that are made for it, are well understood. That’s why the Convention Against Torture, which the U.S. signed and became U.S. law as federal statute 18 U.S.C. §§ 2340; 2340A, says:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

Yet that is what we did. We had lawyers in Washington who came up with legal theories that:

Created a class of people who were beneath the law, like Jews and Gypsies once were.
That evaded the Geneva Conventions.
That legitimized torture.
And said that “I was only following orders” would be a legitimate defense against war crimes charges.
The chief prosecutor at the Nuremburg Trials for war crimes, U.S. Associate Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson said:

Certain acts in violations of treaties are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.

In light of that, let me point out who some of those Washington lawyers are: Jay Bybee, now a federal appeals court judge; John Yoo, teaching law at the University of California, Berkeley; and Alberto Gonzales, recently the attorney general of the United States.

CHENEY WARNS OF NEW ATTACKS




Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.

In an interview Tuesday with Politico, Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantanamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects.

And he asserted that President Obama will either backtrack on his stated intentions to end those policies or put the country at risk in ways more severe than most Americans — and, he charged, many members of Obama’s own team — understand.

“When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry,” Cheney said.

Protecting the country’s security is “a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business,” he said. “These are evil people. And we’re not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.”

Citing intelligence reports, Cheney said at least 61 of the inmates who were released from Guantanamo during the Bush administration — “that’s about 11 or 12 percent” — have “gone back into the business of being terrorists.”

The 200 or so inmates still there, he claimed, are “the hard core” whose “recidivism rate would be much higher.” (Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees have strongly disputed the recidivism figures, asserting that the Pentagon data have inconsistencies and omissions.) Cheney called Guantanamo a “first-class program,” and “a necessary facility” that is operated legally and with better food and treatment than the jails in inmates' native countries.


But he said he worried that “instead of sitting down and carefully evaluating the policies,” Obama officials are unwisely following “campaign rhetoric” and preparing to release terrorism suspects or afford them legal protections granted to more conventional defendants in crime cases.

The choice, he alleged, reflects a naive mindset among the new team in Washington: “The United States needs to be not so much loved as it needs to be respected. Sometimes, that requires us to take actions that generate controversy. I’m not at all sure that that’s what the Obama administration believes.”

The dire portrait Cheney painted of the country’s security situation was made even grimmer by his comments agreeing with analysts who believe this recession may be a once-in-a-century disaster.
“It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” Cheney said. “The combination of the financial crisis that started last year, coupled now with, obviously, a major recession, I think we’re a long way from having solved these problems.”

The interview, less than two weeks after the Bush administration ceded power to Obama, found the man who is arguably the most controversial — and almost surely the most influential — vice president in U.S. history in a self-vindicating mood.

He expressed confidence that files will some day be publicly accessible offering specific evidence that waterboarding and other policies he promoted — over sharp internal dissent from colleagues and harsh public criticism — were directly responsible for averting new Sept. 11-style attacks.

Not content to wait for a historical verdict, Cheney said he is set to plunge into his own memoirs, feeling liberated to describe behind-the-scenes roles over several decades in government now that the “statute of limitations has expired” on many of the most sensitive episodes.

His comments made unmistakable that Cheney — likely more than former President Bush, who has not yet given post-White House interviews — is willing and even eager to spar with the new administration and its supporters over the issues he cares most about.

His standing in this public debate is beset by contradictions. Cheney for years has had intimate access to the sort of highly classified national security intelligence that Obama and his teams are only recently seeing.

But many of the top Democratic legal and national security players have long viewed Cheney as a man who became unhinged by his fears, responsible for major misjudgments in Iraq and Afghanistan, willing to bend or break legal precedents and constitutional principles to advance his aims. Polls show he is one of the most unpopular people in national life.

In the interview, Cheney revealed no doubts about his own course — and many about the new administration’s.

“If it hadn’t been for what we did — with respect to the terrorist surveillance program, or enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees, the Patriot Act, and so forth — then we would have been attacked again,” he said. “Those policies we put in place, in my opinion, were absolutely crucial to getting us through the last seven-plus years without a major-casualty attack on the U.S.”

Cheney said “the ultimate threat to the country” is “a 9/11-type event where the terrorists are armed with something much more dangerous than an airline ticket and a box cutter – a nuclear weapon or a biological agent of some kind” that is deployed in the middle of an American city.

“That’s the one that would involve the deaths of perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, and the one you have to spend a hell of a lot of time guarding against,” he said.

“I think there’s a high probability of such an attempt. Whether or not they can pull it off depends whether or not we keep in place policies that have allowed us to defeat all further attempts, since 9/11, to launch mass-casualty attacks against the United States.

HACKERS CLONE PASSPORTS IN DRIVE BY RFID HEIST



A British hacker has shown how easy it is to clone US passport cards that use RFID by conducting a drive-by test on the streets of San Francisco.

Chris Paget, director of research and development at Seattle-based IOActive, used a US$250 Motorola RFID reader and an antenna mounted in a car’s side window and drove for 20 minutes around San Francisco, with a colleague videoing the demonstration.

During the demonstration he picked up the details of two US passport cards, which are fitted with RFID chips and can be used instead of traditional passports for travel to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean.

“I personally believe that RFID is very unsuitable for tagging people,” he said.

“I don’t believe we should have any kind of identity document with RFID tags in them. My ultimate goal here would be, my dream for this research, would be to see the entire Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative be scrapped.”

Using the data gleaned it would be relatively simple to make cloned passport cards he said. Real passport cards also support a ‘kill code’ (which can wipe the card’s data) and a ‘lock code’ that prevents the tag’s data being changed.

However he believes these are not currently being used and even if they were the radio interrogation is done in plain text so is relatively easy for a hacker to collect and analyse.

The ease with which the passport cards were picked up is even more worrying considering that less than a million have been issued to date.

Paget is a renowned ‘white hat’ ethical hacker and has made the study of the security failings of RFID something of a speciality.

In 2007 he was due to present a paper on the security failings of RFID at the Black Hat security conference in Washington but was forced to abandon the plans after an RFID company threatened him with legal action.

He points out that RFID tags are increasingly being used in physical security systems such as building access cards and the technology needs significant security adding before it could be considered safe for commercial use.

THE WAR ON TERROR IS A HOAX


The War On Terror Is A Hoax
By Paul Craig Roberts
2-4-9


According to US government propaganda, terrorist cells are spread throughout America, making it necessary for the government to spy on all Americans and violate most other constitutional protections. Among President Bush's last words as he left office was the warning that America would soon be struck again by Muslim terrorists.

If America were infected with terrorists, we would not need the government to tell us. We would know it from events. As there are no events, the US government substitutes warnings in order to keep alive the fear that causes the public to accept pointless wars, the infringement of civil liberty, national ID cards, and inconveniences and harassments when they fly.

The most obvious indication that there are no terrorist cells is that not a single neocon has been assassinated.

I do not approve of assassinations, and am ashamed of my country's government for engaging in political assassination. The US and Israel have set a very bad example for al Qaeda to follow.

The US deals with al Qaeda and Taliban by assassinating their leaders, and Israel deals with Hamas by assassinating its leaders. It is reasonable to assume that al Qaeda would deal with the instigators and leaders of America's wars in the Middle East in the same way.

Today every al Qaeda member is aware of the complicity of neoconservatives in the death and devastation inflicted on Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Gaza. Moreover, neocons are highly visible and are soft targets compared to Hamas and Hezbollah leaders. Neocons have been identified in the media for years, and as everyone knows, multiple listings of their names are available online.

Neocons do not have Secret Service protection. Dreadful to contemplate, but it would be child's play for al Qaeda to assassinate any and every neocon. Yet, neocons move around freely, a good indication that the US does not have a terrorist problem.

If, as neocons constantly allege, terrorists can smuggle nuclear weapons or dirty bombs into the US with which to wreak havoc upon our cities, terrorists can acquire weapons with which to assassinate any neocon or former government official.

Yet, the neocons, who are the Americans most hated by Muslims, remain unscathed.

The "war on terror" is a hoax that fronts for American control of oil pipelines, the profits of the military-security complex, the assault on civil liberty by fomenters of a police state, and Israel's territorial expansion.

There were no al Qaeda in Iraq until the Americans brought them there by invading and overthrowing Saddam Hussein, who kept al Qaeda out of Iraq. The Taliban is not a terrorist organization, but a movement attempting to unify Afghanistan under Muslim law. The only Americans threatened by the Taliban are the Americans Bush sent to Afghanistan to kill Taliban and to impose a puppet state on the Afghan people.

Hamas is the democratically elected government of Palestine, or what little remains of Palestine after Israel's illegal annexations. Hamas is a terrorist organization in the same sense that the Israeli government and the US government are terrorist organizations. In an effort to bring Hamas under Israeli hegemony, Israel employs terror bombing and assassinations against Palestinians. Hamas replies to the Israeli terror with homemade and ineffectual rockets.

Hezbollah represents the Shi'ites of southern Lebanon, another area in the Middle East that Israel seeks for its territorial expansion.

The US brands Hamas and Hezbollah "terrorist organizations" for no other reason than the US is on Israel's side of the conflict. There is no objective basis for the US Department of State's "finding" that Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorist organizations. It is merely a propagandistic declaration.

Americans and Israelis do not call their bombings of civilians terror. What Americans and Israelis call terror is the response of oppressed people who are stateless because their countries are ruled by puppets loyal to the oppressors. These people, dispossessed of their own countries, have no State Departments, Defense Departments, seats in the United Nations, or voices in the mainstream media. They can submit to foreign hegemony or resist by the limited means available to them.

The fact that Israel and the United States carry on endless propaganda to prevent this fundamental truth from being realized indicates that it is Israel and the US that are in the wrong and the Palestinians, Lebanese, Iraqis, and Afghans who are being wronged.

The retired American generals who serve as war propagandists for Fox "News" are forever claiming that Iran arms the Iraqi and Afghan insurgents and Hamas. But where are the arms? To deal with American tanks, insurgents have to construct homemade explosive devices out of artillery shells. After six years of conflict the insurgents still have no weapon against the American helicopter gunships. Contrast this "arming" with the weaponry the US supplied to the Afghans three decades ago when they were fighting to drive out the Soviets.

The films of Israel's murderous assault on Gaza show large numbers of Gazans fleeing from Israeli bombs or digging out the dead and maimed, and none of these people are armed. A person would think that by now every Palestinian would be armed, every man, woman, and child. Yet, all the films of the Israeli attack show an unarmed population. Hamas has to construct homemade rockets that are little more than a sign of defiance. If Hamas were armed by Iran, Israel's assault on Gaza would have cost Israel its helicopter gunships, its tanks, and hundreds of lives of its soldiers.

Hamas is a small organization armed with small caliber rifles incapable of penetrating body armor. Hamas is unable to stop small bands of Israeli settlers from descending on West Bank Palestinian villages, driving out the Palestinians, and appropriating their land.

The great mystery is: why after 60 years of oppression are the Palestinians still an unarmed people? Clearly, the Muslim countries are complicit with Israel and the US in keeping the Palestinians unarmed.

The unsupported assertion that Iran supplies sophisticated arms to the Palestinians is like the unsupported assertion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. These assertions are propagandistic justifications for killing Arab civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure in order to secure US and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

PARALLELS WITH THE GREAT DEPRESSION


Parallels With the Great Depression

FDR and ObamaWhat began early last year as a "credit crunch" and an "economic downturn" is now being characterized as a "long, severe recession." Once upon a time, such a crisis was known as a "depression" before Americans became squeamish about such stark language.

As with our reluctant semantic retreat from "credit crunch" to "recession," the reality of another Great Depression will probably not be acknowledged until years after the fact. But America and the rest of the modern world, by doggedly pursuing the same mistaken policies of the 1920s and '30s, have made a full-blown depression — lasting years, not months, and featuring catastrophic failures in entire economic sectors along with chronic double-digit unemployment and monetary malaise — all but inevitable. In fact, the parallels between the run-up to the Great Depression and today's economic havoc are stunning.

The Roaring '20s, '80s, and '90s

By 1929, the United States — and most of the rest of the industrial world — had been on a nine-year joy ride known as the "Roaring Twenties." It was an age of unparalleled new technology — the heyday of the silent film era and the Model T Ford, and the beginning of radio and commercial air service, among many other modern marvels. The first American generation to consecrate itself to mass entertainment came of age in the Twenties. It was the first recognizably modern decade, and the future, to the flappers, barnstormers, and other bons vivants that characterized the age, looked very bright indeed. Accordingly, it was also an age of bold enterprises — of the beginning of mass production and of skyscraper construction. For the first time ever, Americans had enough extra money to turn sports into a lucrative industry. From the vantage point of the mid-Twenties, the party was never going to end.

Like the Roaring Twenties, the long boom from approximately 1982 to 2000 was characterized by boundless optimism and an explosion of new technology. New forms of mass entertainment — MTV, cable television, video games, and the Internet — proliferated, turning the United States of America into the world's entertainment capital. Men with big ideas — the leveraged-buyout moguls of the '80s and the high-tech wizards of the '90s chief among them — had no trouble finding capital to leverage their grandiose ambitions. Like the Twenties, the last two decades of the 20th century were a time of larger-than-life colossi like Donald Trump, Warren Buffett, and numerous flamboyant entertainers, from rock stars and hectomillionaire athletes to the instant celebrities of reality TV and American Idol. Risk and chutzpah were everywhere rewarded and nowhere penalized, or so it seemed. Old-school caution and frugality were cast to the wind; the world belonged to the extravagant, the glitzy, and the fully leveraged.

But behind these two parallel utopias, separated by more than six decades, lay a common reality that none but a very few astute, well-connected, or economically well-schooled were able to perceive: an artificial economic expansion created by the issuance of vast amounts of paper money. The great episodes of monetary expansion of the '20s, '80s, and '90s resulted from the magic of central banking — in America's case, of the Federal Reserve's ability to create new debt by lowering interest rates far below any rational market pricing. This resulted in years of easy credit, abundant borrowing, and an illusion of far greater prosperity and growth rates than actually existed. The result was cultural and societal no less than economic: because so few Americans, then or more recently, understood how the banking and Federal Reserve System works, the illusion of unnatural prosperity encouraged waste, leisure, and the notion of American invincibility.

In both cases, the party came to a calamitous end. But despite what we assume nowadays, few in the late fall of 1929 — even after the storied stock market meltdown — imagined that more than a decade of economic hardship lay ahead. Indeed, had the federal government, and the Federal Reserve in particular, allowed the crisis to run its course, the American economy during the 1930s would have been far different, probably recovering after a severe recession at the beginning of the decade helped restore sanity to the markets.

Disastrous Intervention

Unfortunately, the Hoover administration chose to intervene in the markets to an unprecedented degree. In 1931, when the banking crisis was in full swing, President Hoover set up the short-lived and ineffective National Credit Corporation (NCC). This government agency aimed to induce banks to pool $500 million to help save failing financial institutions. Not surprisingly, banks, anxious to survive individually, were reluctant to participate. The NCC was only able to raise $150 million, and the program was soon terminated and replaced with the much more ambitious — and intrusive — Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC).

The RFC was not altogether a novelty. It was patterned after the War Finance Corporation (WFC), a government bailout fund set up to allow the government to shore up banks and other financial interests during the First World War. After the end of the war, the WFC, rather than being decommissioned, was transformed into a source of government loans for export industries and the farming sector, in which capacity it operated until the mid-'20s under the energetic leadership of one Eugene Meyer.

Meyer, whom Hoover made governor of the Federal Reserve Board in 1930, was appointed chairman of the new RFC in 1932. According to economist Murray Rothbard, "The RFC could make loans to banks and financial institutions of all types. The theory was that, ensured of freedom from failing, the timid banks would be emboldened to lend massively to business and industry, the money supply would rise, and prosperity would return." Additionally, the RFC was authorized to lend money to railroads, as these were deemed a critical industry in the day, too big and too pivotal to be allowed to fail. To achieve these ends, it was given $500 million outright, and authorized to issue up to $1.5 billion in additional securities — government debt, in other words.

The RFC was an abysmal failure, though not for want of trying. Under Meyer the new vehicle for bank and railroad bailouts doled out money right and left, only to see the bank and railroad failures continue apace. Hundreds of millions of dollars poured down various RFC rat holes were lost forever by hopelessly insolvent institutions whose only remaining aim was to service their debts and provide soft landings for major investors. The promised loosening of credit never took place, and commercial lending all but disappeared. The RFC, in a word, was a huge waste of taxpayer dollars at a time when America could ill afford such coerced largesse.

In our day, Congress allowed itself to be stampeded by President Bush, Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson, and a throng of special interests into passing the now-infamous $700 billion bailout bill that created the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

With its emphasis on bank and financial bailouts, as well as more recent forays into Big Three automotive handouts (today's "too-big-to-fail" transportation sector, precisely analogous to railroads in the early 20th century), TARP is eerily similar to Hoover's RFC. From the results so far, TARP is having no more success than its predecessor organization in rescuing the financial and automotive sectors. At the time of this writing, with the full extent of the original subprime meltdown still unfolding, attention is shifting to banks' exposure to the shaky commercial real-estate and so-called Alt-A mortgage market. On the day of President Obama's inauguration, financial stocks swooned, with money-center and regional banks alike caught in the downdraft. The balance of 2009 will likely see many more bank failures, some of the magnitude of Washington Mutual or greater, while of the Big Three automakers, only Ford appears to have some chance of surviving independently. The still-growing financial storm is likely to take a terrible toll, and the $700 billion from TARP will be wasted just like the RFC's misspent millions.

Scapegoating the Free Market

During the Great Depression, as in our day, politicians and the news media blamed the crisis not on government malfeasance but on a failure of the free markets. This false conceit was responsible for a revolution in the relationship between the federal government and the private sector, transforming America from a free-market system into the largely managed economy that we have today.

One of the first steps taken by President Hoover to regulate the activity of the markets was to compel the New York Stock Exchange to curb the practice of short selling. Short selling, whereby an investor borrows securities for immediate resale at a high price, expecting to repurchase them at a lower price, return them to the lender, and pocket the difference, has long been held up as a scapegoat during financial downturns dating all the way back to the 17th-century Dutch tulip market mania. Short selling, however, is merely a way of making money when the market is down, the inverse of purchasing securities in the expectation of profiting from a rise in value. Unlike a straightforward stock purchase, short selling can be a very risky enterprise. Imprudent short selling has ruined many an investor, and the inherent risks associated with the practice act as powerful disincentives. At the same time, short selling acts as a natural counterpoise for the irrational exuberance of the herd that sometimes tends to propel stock valuations to unrealistic highs.

Nevertheless, Wall Street short sellers in the '30s bore the brunt of Hoover's wrath. Later, during the FDR administration, the newly created Securities and Exchange Commission formalized restrictions on short selling in the so-called uptick rule, which from 1938 until July of 2007 imposed a lower limit relative to previous sale prices on the prices of shares sold short. In this way, the ability of selling short to blunt unwarranted rises in stock prices was severely curtailed.

Not long after the repeal of the Depression-era "uptick rule," the stock market began to fall from its dizzying mid-decade gains. Unsurprisingly, the Bush administration on July 15, 2008, imposed restrictions on selling short shares in Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and 17 investment banks, in a desperate bid to keep these institutions' inflated share prices from falling still further. The ban was subsequently lifted, although a similar ban in the UK remained in force until mid-January. However, if the stock market malaise continues into the Obama administration, as it is likely to do, expect restrictions and even an outright ban on short selling (a truly calamitous step) to be foisted on already exhausted investors and financial markets.

As mentioned in the "Correction, Please!" column in this issue (page 41), the Roosevelt administration that followed President Hoover further compounded the economic crisis that had become a depression by effectively nationalizing the entire economy. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 imposed a welter of new federal regulations on banks and the rest of the financial sector, mandating among other things an artificial separation of commercial and investment banking. The Securities Act, passed the same year, created the overweening Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), an entity that, like the rest of FDR's New Deal, had no constitutional legitimacy whatsoever and inflicted immense regulatory damage on the securities markets.

In our day, with a decades-old precedent for federal control over banking and finance, further federal controls likely to be imposed by Congress and the Obama administration will meet little principled resistance and, like the original New Deal, will only serve to further hamper the workings of the free market.

International Currency Crisis

The Great Depression, like the current crisis, was an international phenomenon. Bank failures, unemployment, and other economic problems took their toll across the entire industrial world. This was because central banks overseas did the same thing the American Federal Reserve did during the Roaring Twenties — printed money. They did this in a desperate attempt to rescue the ailing pound sterling, at that time the world's de facto international currency. Britain had gone off the gold standard with the rest of the belligerent nations in World War I, and had printed vast sums of pounds to finance the war effort. After the war, however, rather than accept the consequences in the form of a depreciated pound, Britain insisted on instituting a gold-exchange standard with other industrialized countries, with the pound valued at pre-war par. This meant that, although a true gold standard had been abandoned, foreign investors, banks, and government could still redeem pounds sterling in gold.

But if the artificially high valuation in gold were upheld, the precious metal would leave British shores as foreigners rushed to redeem overvalued pounds — unless other central banks could be persuaded to cooperate by debasing their own currencies in tandem with the pound.

The Americans proved particularly cooperative in this regard, thanks to the chummy relationship between Montagu Norman, the governor of the Bank of England, and Benjamin Strong, the head of the New York Federal Reserve and de facto boss of the entire Federal Reserve System. All through the '20s, Strong, at the behest of Norman, who traveled frequently to New York to cement the relationship, kept the Fed pumping new dollars into the economy, with most Americans oblivious to the fact that the artificial economic boom thereby created was a consequence of Benjamin Strong's desire to please the British banking establishment. When the bust hit, therefore, all of the major currencies had been massively inflated and their respective economies succumbed to the inevitable downturn.

The pound sterling, that supposedly indispensable currency, continued to be touted as unassailable, with Norman and the rest of the British financial nomenklatura promising that Britain would never default on her obligations to redeem the pound in gold. Yet in late 1931, after repeated assurances to the French, Dutch, and other large holders of pounds in reserve, the British government did precisely that, touching off an unprecedented international monetary crisis. In the havoc that followed, Britain and most of the rest of Europe went off even the gold-exchange standard, adopting for the first time an international fiat money regime (money not backed by a precious metal). The United States retained a gold standard, but, under FDR, that too was abandoned, although the dollar remained on an international gold-exchange standard until the Nixon administration.

The international currency crisis that accompanied the collapse of the gold standard in the early '30s prompted calls to "fix" the international currency markets by creating an international financial authority to restore order. The one concrete step in this direction was the establishment, in 1930 and at the behest of Montagu Norman, of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, a sort of bank for central bankers. Yet the BIS could neither forestall the abandonment of the gold standard (if such were ever its objective) nor mitigate the monetary chaos that followed.

The next attempt at an international financial order came in summer of 1933 with the World Economic Conference in London, convoked under the authority of the League of Nations. The purpose of the conference, to set up some kind of international stabilizing mechanism for the world's beleaguered currencies, was hampered from the start by widely divergent opinions among the participating nations as to the proper course to follow. France, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland, for example, doggedly clung to the gold standard, while America, enamored of the new doctrine of monetarism (that is, of pursuing inflationary policies to keep the economic pump primed), had no use for what it viewed as outmoded restraints. The conference accomplished little except to prefigure the creation of the first true global financial regime at Bretton Woods little more than a decade later.

In our time, the dollar has replaced the pound as the world's currency. No longer restrained by the inhibiting factor of a precious-metal standard, the American government has for decades been willing to print dollars almost without limit, and the rest of the world has been willing to accept them on trust. However, the Federal Reserve has for many years collaborated closely with the world's other major central banks, coordinating its inflationary policies to ensure that everybody else (or at least those responsible for the so-called "hard currencies") is inflating in tandem with the United States.

And once again, when the inflationary chickens came home to roost, the crisis was and is international. The deluge of easy money worldwide has brought about an avalanche of bankruptcies and a burgeoning global recession. Other governments worldwide are pursuing feckless bailouts and other interventionist policies similar to those of our own government, with similarly negative results.

Parallel Problems and Pressures

And just like in the '30s, pressure is building for a new international financial regime — for the same political and financial elites who created the problems to try to solve them. This time around, the inaugural conference was held not in London but in Washington, at the behest of the UN and other modern global authorities rather than the old League of Nations. And as in 1933, the participants in the recent international economic conference expect their efforts to culminate in a Bretton Woods-like revolution in international finance.

In sum, very little has changed in 70 years except the names of the actors. Given how closely events in 2008-2009 have tracked those of 1929-1933, it appears increasingly probable that the consequences of those actions — a lengthy, debilitating depression — will be the same as well.

ISRAELI SPOKESWOMAN OPENLY BRAGS ABOUT CONTROLLING AMERICA



"Another Israeli spokeswoman, Tzipora Menache, stated that she was not worried about negative ramifications the Israeli onslaught on Gaza might have on the way the Obama administration would view Israel. She said 'You know very well, and the stupid Americans know equally well, that we control their government, irrespective of who sits in the White House. You see, I know it and you know it that no American president can be in a position to challenge us even if we do the unthinkable. What can they (Americans) do to us? We control congress, we control the media, we control show biz, and we control everything in America. In America you can criticize God, but you can't criticize Israel."

Commenting on the latest Israeli one-directional onslaught against the Palestinians of Gaza Strip, the Israeli 10th TV channel has disclosed that the Israeli genocidal forces had used half of its air force and had launched at least 2500 air raids against Gaza Strip.

The television military correspondent stated that the Israeli warplanes had dropped more than a thousand tons of explosives, including white phosphorous and DIME (Dense Inert Metal Explosive) bombs, during three weeks on the virtually unarmed densely populated 360 square Kilometers Strip.

He added that the shells fired by tanks, artillery, gunboats, and infantry were not included in those fired by the air force.

After a whole week of continuous air bombardments Israel sent in its elite foot soldiers; 30,000 of them, and called in 10,000 of its reservists. Armed with the latest weapons of mass murder, covered with an umbrella of free reigning air force, and accompanied with raining shells of heavy artilleries, they drove their tanks into the civilian towns murdering civilians and destroying every structure in their path.

Living outside of Gaza one cannot fully understand the barbarity of this genocide especially when the Western media had barely covered any of its atrocity. To gain a slight idea of its enormity one should remember that, during the 6-days war of 1967, this same Israeli army was distributed on four fronts; Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian, and Lebanese, and it was fighting regular armies. Now the whole brunt of this army is concentrated on a small strip against unarmed and untrained civilian population.

Latest official count was 1350 murdered, 40% of them were children, and 5300 were injured; mutilated and amputated. It was reported that 80% of the injured were the victims of burning phosphorous bombs. More dead are being discovered under the rebels, and many seriously injured are expected later on to die.

Israeli tanks had left several city blocks completely destroyed without any homes or structure standing. The tanks shelled homes and apartment towers. Due to the small size of Gaza Strip Palestinians had to build vertically. Many apartment towers went up 15-20 stories high with each story containing 6-8 apartments.

A total of 20,000 buildings were completely or partially burnt and damaged. The UN has reported that more than 50,000 Palestinians are left homeless and are now crowded into 50 emergency shelters.

An estimated of 50,000 more are living with relatives and in tents they erected on the ruins of their homes.

The Israeli bombardment targeted everything in Gaza including government buildings, police headquarters, banks and business offices, the main university, 67 schools sheltering civilians, shopping centers and market places, factories, water, sewer, and electricity infrastructures, private homes and apartment towers and charity organizations.

Farms, including their animals, were also targeted and hundreds of acres of crops and fruit groves were incinerated. Religious buildings, where civilians usually seek shelter, were specifically targeted. Israeli fighter planes had completely destroyed 41 mosques, and partially damaged 51 others. One church was also targeted. Even cemeteries were not spared; 5 of them were bombed.

Although the Israeli army was given the exact GPS co-ordinates of every UN structure, as asserted by Christopher Gunness, the UNRWA spokesman, Israeli F-16 planes had repeatedly dropped phosphorous bombed on UN schools knowing very well that hundreds of civilians had taken shelter there. At least 45 children and women were burnt and murdered there.

The UN headquarters in Gaza City was also hit with three, not just one, phosphorous bombs burning tons of humanitarian aid and food stuff. The fire kept on burning for three days. UN-flagged humanitarian convoy was also shelled killing one driver.

Medical centers and paramedics were not spared. The Red Crescent Al-Quds hospital in Tal el-Hawa neighborhood was hit by Israeli shells and caught on fire. Other two hospitals; Al-Wafa and Al-Fata hospitals, were also shelled, leading the World Health Organization to express its deep concern about the serious implications of such bombardments. 16 other smaller health clinics and 16 ambulances were also damaged. Medics were targeted and prevented from helping the injured. Ten of them, including two doctors, were murdered.

Media centers were particularly targeted. Local and international news reporters were prevented from entering Gaza. Those, who were able to enter, were directly targeted. The Al-Shuruq office tower housing several international and Arab media outlets was directly hit. Two cameramen working for Abu Dhabi TV were injured, while the offices of Reuters News Agency, Fox TV, Sky, and Al-Arabiya TV offices were damaged. Another raid had damaged the headquarter offices of Al-Resala newspaper.

Similar to all their previous wars the Israeli soldiers had committed massacres against Palestinian unarmed civilians. They have used internationally banned weapons such as phosphorous bombs, DIME, and depleted uranium, as reported by international physicians, eyewitnesses, and military experts. Israeli soldiers had mutilated the bodies of their victims to instill terror in the hearts of people hoping they will leave Gaza. Israeli soldiers herded many families in one building using them as human shield, and then later on bombed the building on top of them. They shot civilians, mainly children, directly and at point blank. The bodies of some children were found shot several times; as many as 18 bullets in the body of a 12 years old girl, and 12 bullets in the body of her 2 years old sister.

Israeli soldiers had wiped off whole Palestinian families. Al-Samuni family lost 11 members, Abu Aisha family lost 6, Batran family lost 6, al-Rayyan family lost 15 and al-Balousha family lost 5 sisters. Other families, too many to mention here, were either murdered or incinerated by the phosphorous bombs. The Israeli army has been carrying out a deliberate indiscriminate mass murder. During the first Intifada, 1987 - 1993, they murdered 1162 Palestinians. During the second Intifada, 2001- 2006, they murdered 5500 Palestinians. Now, in a short period of three weeks, they murdered 1350 Palestinians.

This onslaught is a holocaust since the many tons of phosphorous bombs, dropped on Gaza cities, had burnt civilians to the bones, burnt their homes and buildings, and burnt their fields and crops. This is the holocaust that the Israeli Deputy Defense Minister, Matan Vilnai, had threatened Palestinians with when he stated: "the more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah (holocaust) because we will use all our might to defend ourselves."

One cannot help but wonder how could a group of people, who claim to be the victims of a holocaust, commit another holocaust against another nation. What is it that feeds, perpetuates and intensifies this Judaic genocidal spirit although all Arabs, including Palestinians, had offered these Zionist Jews many agreements of coexistence, peace and security? The answer comes through their media outlets, through the words of their scholarly educators, and through the teachings of their Rabbis.

"All of the Palestinians must be killed; men, women, infants, and even their beasts" cries the religious opinion of Rabbi Yisrael Rosen, the director of the long-established Tsomet Religious Institute. He wrote that Palestinians are like the nation of Amalekites, who attacked the Israelite tribes led by Moses on their way to Jerusalem. He stated that the Lord sent down in the Torah a ruling that allowed the Jews to kill the Amalekites, and that this ruling is known in Jewish jurisprudence.

The Torah states: "Annihilate the Amalekites from the beginning to the end. Kill them and wrest them from their possessions. Show them no mercy. Kill continuously, one after the other. Leave no child, plant, or tree. Kill their beasts, from camels to donkeys." Rosen stated that Amalekites are not a particular race, but rather all those who hate and oppose the Jews; Christians and Muslims.

Many leading Israeli Rabbis support Rosen's views. Israel's former Sephardic Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu advocated carpet bombing of Gaza stating that "there is absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during massive military offensive on Gaza" (The Jerusalem Post, 30 May, 2007). His son Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu amplified his father's genocidal call stating: "if they don't stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand, then we must kill 10,000 and even a million"

Many Rabbis had argued that Palestinians in Gaza are not innocent civilians and that during war time it is not individuals but nations the Israelis are fighting. (It seems that Hitler had adopted this Telmudic teaching when he persecuted all European Jews)

Israeli educators, scholars, and politicians, openly, advocate the annihilation of all Palestinians. Dr. Nachum Rakover, a legal scholar, opined "They voted for killers and sent them to kill us. To call them (civilians) innocent is a tragic comedyS civilians are partners of the killers" Eli Yeshai, Israeli official in the Orthodox Shas party argued that "extermination of the enemy is sanctioned by the Torah" Many other politicians called for the need for "wiping off Gaza from the face of earth", and "annihilating of every moving thing there." The right-wing Israeli politician Avigdor Lieberman proposed nuking Gaza following the US example when it dropped the atomic bomb on Japan during WWII.

This "ideology of annihilation" is by no means a minority opinion in Israel, but represents a mainstream in the Jews of Israel as well as Jews in the West (US). The popular attitude is "if it was right by God to order us to commit genocide during Biblical time, why can't it be right to commit genocide now. Has God changed his mind?" Indeed, the Judaic god is a racist genocidal god.

Watch and listen here to an example of how Israeli Jews are brainwashed and indoctrinated into the ideology of annihilation by their rabbis and scholars through Israeli media. Watch Max Blumenthal's videotape of a group of messianic Orthodox Jewish Chabad-Lubavitch exhibit this ideology in NYC in January 11, 2009.

The Israeli spokesman, Nachman Abramovic demonized Palestinian children stating "They may look young to you, but these people are terrorists at heart. Don't look at their deceptively innocent faces, try to think of the demons inside each of them S I am absolutely certain these people would grow to be evil terrorists if we allowed them to growS would you allow them to grow to kill your children or finish them off right now? S honest and moral people ought to differentiate between true humans and human animals. We do kill human animals and we do so unapologetically. Besides who in the West is in a position to lecture us on killing human animals. After all, whose hands are clean?"

Human animal mentioned by Abramovic refers to the Judaic religious belief that Jews are Gods chosen people; the elite and the pure-blooded, while all others (non-Jews, Goyim, gentiles) are animal souls incarnated into human bodies to serve the Jews. Killing a human animal is just a sport like hunting deer or birds.
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